Foolish & Weak



                1 Corinthians 1:25 “For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.”
                This verse has been on my mind a lot lately. I have been trying to figure out just what the foolishness of God might be. The only thing I can come up with was his foolishness in creating man. (Please note: man = all humankind) Think about it; man has goofed up everything since the Garden of Eden. Man is the reason God provided a Savior. Yet, he states that His foolishness is wiser than man’s wisdom.
                So what is man’s wisdom? If we follow the leading of the world, wisdom is getting ahead, having money, having possessions, looking good by the world’s standards and an assortment of other similar ideas.  God’s wisdom, leads us to build relationships with others, to serve others and give to others. We often hear that you can’t out give God.  The words of Jesus in Luke 6:38 “Give and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over will be poured into your lap.” So, why is it we work so hard? We neglect our families and friends and chase after material things?  Do we believe we know better than God?  I don’t think we think that way. What I think is that to stop chasing means we have to put our complete trust in Him. We need to accept the Lord’s measuring cup. It isn’t easy to realize that what we want is not necessarily what God will give. We believe that being served is greater than serving but Jesus says otherwise in Mark 10:43-45, “…Instead, whoever wants to become great among you, must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first, must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”  In this world of selfies (I’m guilty) and looking for the next hot item, the idea of serving others somehow falls beneath us. (In our own wisdom.)
                Man is also God’s weakness. He loves us so much that he sent his only Son to die for us!  Think about how you feel when a small child or another grown up publicly declares love for you. God must go weak in the knees when we proclaim and live out our love for him! The next time we desire to impress someone, let’s impress God first.
Posted by

Comments

  1. harleyAugust 8, 2015 at 10:36 PM

    When Paul was on earth, knowledge was advancing and already gaining depth in certain fields. Today the advances in knowledge and understanding stagger the mind. Paul was not side tracked by all the worldly wisdom around him. At 2 Cor. 2:2 he says: "For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified." Most of the worldly wise in colleges, universities, corporations, etc. view that simple wisdom as backwards and foolish. They view Jesus as a weakling on a cross between two other weaklings on a cross. All three criminal weaklings died and got what they deserved and that's the end of it. When Jesus said: "I am thirsty . . . It is finished, the worldly wise in the colleges and universities understand those words to be his last in the flesh under extreme duress. However, to attribute line after line of eloquent articulate speech to Jesus (from John 20:15 to Rev. 22:20) after he deceased is plum foolishness to them. They cannot wrap their head around it. If it's true, then there is a living God and they would rather not believe that.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How are you?

Image
            When I wake, one of the first things I do is say, “Good morning God!” Some days are more enthusiastic than others. When I greet another human being, I usually follow that greeting with, “how are you?” This morning it occurred to me that I don’t ask God how he is. I have been contemplating this idea, how are you God? Obviously, given his attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience it is easy to follow the train of thought that he has everything in check. Despite that; I think of him in human terms and I can’t help but feel he is; not mad but disappointed (cringe). When he looks at creation, like a parent gazing on the wreckage of a kid’s toy room, wouldn’t there be disappointment?             As I contemplated that, my meandering mind led me to consider guilt. The guilt that leads to the disappointment of others. Every culture I have known lays claim to guilt; Lutheran guilt, Catholic guilt, Jewish guilt, Italian guilt and so on. Truth be told, we’re all guil
Read more

Out of the Mouth

Image
  Genesis 3:14 “God said to Moses, ‘I AM who I AM.’ This is what you are to say to the Israelites: “I Am has sent me to you.”             I feel the need to make a disclaimer statement up front as I can see what I will write in these next few sentences could be misconstrued. This writing is not claiming that man is God although I will say, that if you have claimed the Holy Spirit lives in you, that identifies that God is in you too.             How many times a day do you use the phrase “I am…”? Probably much more than you or I realize. This is how God identified Himself to Moses. “I AM who I AM” We often refer to God as the great I AM, which He is. Going back to how often we use the phrase, for myself those two words are often followed with denigrating words like; so stupid, so foolish, so dumb, so angry, so hurt, so fill in the blank. What if each time we thought about those two words and how we identify ourselves we replaced “I AM” with “God is” most of us (I make this assumptio
Read more

Masterpiece

Image
              As a young person, I was fond of painting, not great at it but reasonable. I set it aside when I fell in love and got married. In these days of isolation I needed to find some other ways to occupy myself other than baking and decided to get back to my paint brushes.   To get used to handling the brushes again I got myself a paint by number,             If you have never tried one of these let me give you a little insight. You receive a canvas with an image divided up into numbered areas and little pots of paint with corresponding numbers. Then you begin a sort of scavenger hunt trying to fill in all the spots of a particular number. Sounds simple enough, however some of these areas are so tiny they are easily overlooked. The tiny spots are important though, they give that little flourish that can draw the eye or round out an object.             Why do I tell you about this? As I dove into this project, a great life analogy was revealed to me and I do love a good word
Read more