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Third Avenue Baptist Church

Louisville, KY

Malachi 1:6–14

February 8, 2026

The post Malachi 1:6–14 appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

It is great joy for me to welcome you to this convocation service, this special academic year special because of the particular stewardship called to us in every generation and every year and for this school in every term. Even this morning, I was just because of something else, reminded of how precious the stewardship really is. What a joy it is, what a privilege it is to look around this room and know that here and even beyond this room, there are thousands of students studying here for the preparation for consecrated lives of ministry and service work in the world.

It’s a very special honor and privilege to be in such a place that anytime but by God’s mercy and sovereignty, it is a particular joy to be with you in this sacred place at this particular time, speaking of the times, my text morning is from Matthew chapter 16, just the opening four verses. By the Holy Spirit, Matthew writes,

“And the Pharisees and the Sadducees came and to test him, they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them. When it is evening, you say it will be fair weather for the sky is red and in the morning it will be stormy today for the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times and evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. So he left them and departed.”

It’s a short text in the gospel of Matthew. It’s one of those transitional texts in which it’s very clear that something is about to happen and part of the increased dynamism of what took place in the earthly ministry of Jesus, things are coming to a head. In this text, of course, it’s the Pharisees and the Sadducees who came and to test the Christ, they ask him to show a sign from heaven.

In verse three, Jesus responded to them by very clearly saying, you know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. He gave them a sign, the sign of Jonah, he left them and departed. It’s a very short text. It’s a lot for us to consider. First of all, we have to be clear about what in the world is going on here. I guess the foreground here could be the entirety of the work of God up until Matthew chapter 16 or the entirety of the gospel of Matthew up to chapter 16, but in particular, I want us just to think about chapters 14 and 15. I want us to think about two things, healings and feedings.

Let’s talk about the healings. In chapter 14, as you see at the end of that chapter, Jesus heals the sick in Gennesaret and when they crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and when the men of that place recognized him, they sent around to all that region and brought to him all who were sick and implored him that they might only touch the fringe of his garment and as many as touched it were made well.

Chapter 14, in chapter 15, similarly we come to understand there was a healing. It comes in chapter 29:

“Jesus went on from there and walked beside the sea of Galilee and he went up on the mountain and sat there and great crowds came to him bringing with them the lame, the blind, the crippled in the mute and many others and they put them at his feet and he healed them so that the crowd wondered and they saw the mute speaking, the crippled healthy, the lame walking and the blind seeing, and they glorified the God of Israel.”

Just in these two chapters, two different passages of healings and then astoundingly two mass feedings, chapter 14, the feeding of the 5,000. Now when Jesus heard this in chapter 14, verse 13,

“Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself, but when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns and he when ashore, he saw a great crowd and he had compassion on them and healed their sick. Now, when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, this is a desolate place and the day is now over, send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves. But Jesus said, they need not go away. You give them something to eat. They said to him, we have only five loaves here and two fish, and he said, bring them here to me. Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass and taking the five loaves and the two fish. He looked up to heaven and said a blessing. Then he broke the loaves, gave them to his disciples and the disciples gave them to the crowds and they all ate and were satisfied and they took up the 12 baskets of the broken pieces left over and those who ate were about 5,000 men besides women and children.”

Chapter 15, beginning in verse 32, the feeding of the 4,000. “Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me until now three days and have nothing to eat and I am unwilling to send them away hungry lest they faint on the way. And the disciples said to him, where are we to get enough bread in such a desolate place to feed so greater crowd? He said to them, how many loaves do you have? They said, seven and a few small fish. And directing the crowd to sit down on the ground. He took the seven loaves and the fish and having given thanks, he broke them and gave them to the disciples and the disciples gave them to the crowds and they all ate and were satisfied and they took up seven baskets full of the broken pieces left over. Those who ate were 4,000 men besides women and children, and after sending away the crowds, he got into a boat and went to the region of Magadan.”

All that’s necessary in order to understand the arrogance of the scribes in this case, the Pharisees and the Sadducees who came to accost Jesus in the beginning of Matthew chapter 16, to test him, to test him, they ask him to show them a sign from heaven. Now obviously at this crucial turning point in the first gospel, we are to see those who go away from Jesus, those who demand signs as those who are rejecting both Christ and the gospel. There’s some patterns we find. One of those patterns is the phrase and the crowds came. And we also see some other interesting patterns. In verse 15, in chapter 15, verse one we hear, and the Pharisees and scribes came in chapter 16 verse one and the Pharisees and the Sadducees came, so the crowds came and the crowds went. The scribes did the Pharisees come. Then the Sadducees with the Pharisees come.

This is a tough crowd. This is a very tough crowd, whether it’s the Pharisees and the Sadducees or the Pharisees and the scribes, it’s double trouble both times. Put them together triple trouble. And so the difference is in these passages when the crowds come, signs are given, healings take place. Thousands are fed just from a few loaves and fishes. We’re talking about two subsequent chapters. It’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t get the point from the first feeding of the thousands. Here in the proximity of two chapters are two and the healings over and over and over again, off course, and in these two chapters, again, healings have just taken place. Astounding feedings have just taken place. Supernatural miracles have just taken place to such an extent that it is unbelievable arrogance. Then for the scribes and the Sadducees here to demand a sign.

This is not a pattern that is passed. This is not just something from ancient biblical history. I think many of us have had conversations that have followed a similar kind of pattern, I would believe, but if I only saw, I would believe if I only observed, I would believe, and of course this pattern is found and is addressed. So honestly in the New Testament itself, Jesus himself would say to Thomas, blessed are those who do not see and believe. We’d like to think that if we saw it, we would recognize it for what it is. If we saw a miracle, we would recognize it for what it is. If the mute could speak and the bind could see, we’d like to think we would see it for what it was. If the lame can walk, we’d like to think, okay, we would see that for exactly what it is. If the dead are raised a life for crying out loud, we get the point. But with biblical humility, we have to wonder, we’d like to think that if Jesus were before us having performed these miracles, we would see him for who he is.

But the Pharisees and the Sadducees in verse one, as we begin this passage we’re told they came to test him. They ask him to show a sign, not just a sign, but a sign from heaven. He said, well, you guys know a lot. You’re asking for a sign from heaven. This may be distinct in some way from a miracle in terms of a heavenly message. When it’s evening, you look at the sky, if you see the sky is red, you say it will be fair weather. And in the morning you look at the sky and you say, it’ll be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening the difference between red, red and threatening, they know the difference. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky.

Now, there was a time when this was more important and it was still pretty much approximate. The Federal Aviation Administration just this week released a report, a post-incident report on a fatal crash of a private jet. The full investigation is not released, but one of the observations made in the FAA investigative report is that the skies were changing so fast that the conditions changed from when the pilots originally made the fight plan to when they were authorized to taxi and when they reached the altitude of only about 1400 feet, the weather had already changed again. That would represent quite a challenge to a pilot and the ancient world, it was often the Mariners who had the most at stake, and that’s one of the reasons why seafaring peoples gave a very different pattern of understanding the skies because there was so much at stake.

Farmers have to have some kind of indication, not that they have any control over what’s going to happen, but at least if there’s a storm coming or there’s bad weather coming, perhaps some preventative measures can be taken. I was a pastor in rural Kentucky, pastor of a farming community, and there were plenty of farmers, and farmers are not the most talkative people sometimes. And after a service they would all be standing out in front of the church and the men would be talking about any number of things, but most of them were closely related to the weather. And if you’re a farmer, you’re very concerned about the weather, particularly whether there will be rain to water the crops.

Now, we’re not confusing the Pharisees and the Sadducees with farmers, nor mariners sailors, they’re scribes as we see in one verse and here in chapter 16 verse one, they’re Pharisees and Sadducees. These aren’t farmers or sailors. These are religious folk, professional religious folk. Honestly, when I read this passage, I’m not sure they had to be too good about the sky. I mean, because after all, if you’re going to Pharisee or you’re going to Sadducee, the weather doesn’t matter all that much. Not exactly like getting on a ship, planting a crop.

Of course the theological context here is all important. Here you have this group of Pharisees and Sadducees and we know what they’re doing because Matthew tells us they came, but they didn’t come to worship him. They did not come to confess him. They did not come to follow him. They came to test him, and their test was this demand for a sign. He says, I’m not going to give you a sign. He does sort of give them a sign. He says, an evil and adulterous generation ask for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah, the sign of himself, the sign of three days if he would rise again.

But the focus of my attention is on the latter part of verse three. “You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.” I’m not sure how good we are at this either ,honestly. But before we think about this in a more elaborate way, let’s first of all put it in its New Testament kerygmatic context and understand the most important reference point here is the incarnation of the Christ and the assured coming of his kingdom and glory. This is not just about signs of the times as in understanding the politics and the foreign policy and all the rest. This has mostly to do with the fact that they were demanding a sign after all these signs had already been given. The signs were the indication, another demonstration in revelation of the fact this is the promised one, the Messiah, the Christ, and more.

Jesus says, you cannot interpret the signs of the times. This is a rebuke. It’s a severe rebuke. It’s a rebuke. Most importantly about the gospel. It’s a rebuke most importantly about the failure to recognize who he is. And the fact that they had come to test him, it’s another indication that the issue here is not one of ignorance, it is one of arrogance. There’s no reason to believe they don’t know everything that has just happened. There’s no reason to believe they don’t know about the feeding of the 5,000 in the feeding of the 4,000. There’s no reason to believe they don’t know about all the healings. They know about the healings. They know about the feedings, they know about the signs, but they want to test him. Jesus responds with this rebuke, but for the believing church, this rebuke also comes as a warning to us, lest we fail to interpret the signs of the times.

I can remember hearing a reference to this text as a pretext for strategic planning. That is not what we’re talking about, but we are called to understand the signs of the times. Most importantly for us, it is the time right now between the ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ and his coming again in glory. It is the time right now when we are awaiting the kingdom in its fullness and the arrival of the king. It’s a time in which the church has been given a responsibility, commission, command. Many of these are direct continuation of commands given to the people of God and the Old Testament.

Now, in a gospel context, given with a new urgency, a new energy, a new gospel, a new eschatology for the people of God. I want to look at a different passage as well. This passage is less well known. It’s in 1 Chronicles chapter 12, and this is in the listing of David’s mighty men who joined him in Ziklag. It’s just one brief expression about one of the tribes Manasses, and then after that Issachar of the half tribe of Manasseh, 18,000 who were expressly named to come and make David King, what a thing to be said. Then in verse 32, “Of Issachar men who had understanding of the times to know what Israel ought to do, 200 chiefs and all their kinsmen under their command.” You know, there are all kinds of things that could be said about the tribes and you see many things said here, and not only in this passage but in another Old Testament passages, amazing things said about the tribes and not much is actually said about Issachar. Issachar is not a tribe that is famous for us. If it was a jeopardy question, I think even a most Southern Baptists would fail the jeopardy test. Issachar is just not the first tribe that comes to mind, but Issachar is mentioned in such an interesting way here, and this is a description of honor. This is a description of respect. It’s carefully constructed. Men who had understanding of the times to know what Israel ought to do.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees are criticized for not knowing the times, not even seeing the signs of the times in contrast in a different context. Here, the sons of Issachar are praised for knowing the times, men who had understanding of the times and then the next words. Evidently this is really crucial to know what Israel ought to do. Well, the point of this message this morning is a word of encouragement and to learn from Matthew chapter 16 and also from this reference to 1 Chronicles chapter 12, that evidently we are to pay some attention to the times and to the signs of the times. Don’t worry, there’s no new amazing book of breathtaking prophecy about to come from my pen. I don’t have any marketing advice to offer. This is nothing about a rare opportunity right now because of market conditions to make an investment that will pay off for the rest of your life. I don’t have any such signs of any times.

I can’t tell you if the market’s going to go up or going to go down. I can tell you that I don’t think that’s what either of these texts is about. In Matthew, it’s very clearly kerygmatic related to the gospel here in one Chronicles chapter 12. It’s clearly within the context of the rise of David, the anointed king. But it does tell us something that Jesus pinpointed the fact that these Pharisees and Sadducees could read the skies, but they can’t read the times and they will not see what is right before them, what is obvious before them, and this is a different time now, the Messianic age has come and they don’t see it. They think they can see a thunderstorm coming, but the Messianic age, they miss or even worse, they deny. And evidently the interesting thing about the reference to the sons of Issachar is that this appears to have been a unique contribution from this tribe. So evidently out of all the tribes of Israel, only one of them is actually mentioned with this honorific: “they understood the times and knew what Israel ought to do.”

I just want to suggest to us that we better know the signs of the times, and we better have a pretty good idea of what God’s people ought to do. Well, we’re at the beginning of a term. That’s one time, and we recognize as I think about the times, there’s no bigger distinction in terms of the academic schedule. There’s no bigger distinction than the beginning of a term and the end of a term, and this is just part of the academic life. This is just a part of the way it works. It’s the difference between the books fresh to be read and at the end the tests looming to be taken. And at the beginning of a term, everything is concentrated on what are we going to do this term? The industry already starts to shift as you get down into the term. This is just a part of academic life. It’s just a part of the way schools work and it’s good that we gather together at the beginning of a term to say something important is happening here. And for Christians especially to understand we better know what we’re doing. We better know what we’re teaching. We better know what we’re believing and we better know what we’re doing because the time is short. The semester looks so long the first week of February and so short the last week of April.

So it is. I think we need to know our times and I think about this because I think we need to acknowledge our times are strange.

William Manchester wrote a book entitled The World Lit Only by Fire about the medieval era, and it’s an interesting read. The opening illustration is one that I’ve never been able to forget. When he talks about the dark ages, he explains that in some ways they were for much of Europe dark part of it was because Europe was at the time so forested. He begins with this interesting little anecdote that a squirrel could climb up a tree in Moscow and down a tree in Paris. The canopy of trees was so intact in Europe at the time, but about the passage of time Manchester just cites diaries and historical accounts through much of that long period, let’s just say a millennium. We now know that much did happen. We know that much did happen, but the amazing thing about all that time was that a son could pretty much expect to live the world his father had lived, his father had expected to live the world his father had lived and you could go back for a long way because no one’s expecting radical social change and frankly no one alive had even experienced it.

We understand that our times are very different. Without going into some kind of extended sociological analysis, we understand that we are experiencing what some call hypervelocity in the acceleration of culture now. Now it’s the opposite of Manchester’s depiction of the Middle Ages in Europe. Now, a father looking to his son assumes that son is going to know a very different world than he has known and maybe he himself will live long enough that he will be through two or three worlds of change. Just in the period that I’ve been associated with the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Boyce College, I can tell you the world’s changed two or three times.

Some of it is just dateable by technology. When I became president of this institution, we didn’t have a webpage and we didn’t know we didn’t have one. It would be years before we found out we didn’t have one. According to some internet researchers we’re the first theological seminary to have had one, and it is now found in an internet archive, our first webpage. It’s hilarious. It’s absolutely hilarious. The pixels are so big, it looks like a child did it with some kind of a marker board, but no, that was high technology at the time. And of course other things have happened. I mean when we talk about online offline, none of that existed. But in a far more fundamental sense, the world has changed. The word marriage has changed in terms of the cultural usage. The word marriage in 1993 meant one thing to everybody, and now we’re in a very different era. And you just go down the list. We’re living in very interesting times. The acceleration of the change around us and the fundamental nature of this change. We were living in a giant distortion field. It’s hard for us even to take account of how fast things are changing, and part of this is undoubtedly secularization. Even last night doing some research, I was just looking at some statistics in terms of church going for instance, Protestant church going and metropolitan areas in the United States, and this was just 1994, 1995. And you look at that, I go, that world doesn’t even exist anymore.

But the secularization of the society is not something that’s just sociological. We understand that theologically we’re just in a different place even in terms of people recognizing what we’re talking about. There’s just been this great shift in the way people think and the way people even feel and the way they intuit. And of course this revolution in morality is just reshaping everything. And even as right now we’re witnessing for example some pushback on T as in LGBTQ, the fact is that the LG, the B, in other words, the society believes it has actually just moved on from all that. The T may be a temporary blip. I think often about those who had taught in this institution in decades past and led this institution in decades past, and the people who taught me and the people who taught successive generations, I don’t know that I could explain the current situation to them. I am not sure they would even have the equipment to understand what I’m talking about, but this is the world we live in and frankly one of my concerns, and I think a concern shared very much by this faculty and by those who love this institution and support this institution is will the students here and the graduates of this institution be up to this challenge?

I’ve come to the conclusion that you will not be. You can stop and sing a hymn and go home. Not in yourselves. Not in yourselves. I don’t think even looking at these two biblical texts, I don’t think that any of us in this room, younger or older, has sufficient perception to see it all and know it all and understand it all to be able to be master of it all. There’s too much and it is coming too fast, but of this, I am confident that he who died and was buried and was raised from the dead, He who dwells within you, he is quite capable of seeing you through and me through whatever the age throws at us and we are given the indwelling Christ. We are given the Holy Spirit. We are given the text of scripture which we just read. We in ourselves are dead meat in terms of trying to figure all this out. But by God’s grace, we’re given all that we need through the ordinary means of grace and most importantly through the preaching of the word.

We look at this with a particular conception of history. If we’re trying to think of the signs of the times and trying to understand those times and try to understand what Israel should do or what we should do or the church of the Lord Jesus Christ should do. In those cultures that have a more cyclical view of history, everything has happening has already happened and will happen again and whatever happened before, after will come after the before again.

But the biblical worldview of history is not that at all. Instead, it’s Genesis, in the beginning and it’s eschaton, in the end and it’s a straight line in between. Which is to say you’re going into uncharted territory. I can’t tell you the times ahead, I can’t. It’s outside. My control is outside my analysis. It’s outside my conjecture. I do think I know this. The times ahead are not going to get easier than the times. Now, the challenges are not going to be lesser, almost assuredly, I think I can say the challenges are going to be greater, but Jesus Christ is Lord.

So I have a couple of concrete suggestions about how you and we should think about understanding the times. First, just know your time, where we are in history, and by that I don’t mean just the year you were born. We’re in gospel time. That’s the most important thing. We’re in preaching of the gospel time we’re in taking of the gospel to the nation’s time. We are in faithfulness time for the church in this in-between time, the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to redeem sinners, his ascension to heaven and his coming again. And in this in-between time, we are given a lot to do. So that’s a great security to believers. We begin with knowing our times. We are in the gospel time, we’re in the church age. We got a job to do.

Secondly, we must pay heed to the signs of the times because this does have to do with how we are faithful and the degree to which we are faithful. We do have to pay attention to what’s going on around us. It would not be a strength to the church to be ignorant of, for example, the subversion of marriage and the effects of that in the society around us and the confusion just think of that one example. I mean just we have to be attentive to these things when we use the word marriage. Now we have to define what we mean biblical terms because we don’t assume everyone’s going to understand or share a common definition, just one example.

But third, it’s not enough to know the signs of the times, we have to know what Israel ought to do. And this is one of the most crucial issues. What I hope and pray is that especially the students, both the seminary and the college, that you’ll be a gift of Christ church in such a way that you’ll know what Israel ought to do. That you’ll know what the church of the Lord Jesus Christ must do. You’ll know how to lead and how to live in faithfulness so that whatever the world throws at you, whatever redefinition of any term, no matter what great challenge the world throws at you, you will know what the church of the Lord Jesus Christ ought to do. I guess I just want to urge on you and on all of us, the urgency of well, understanding that responsibility in this sense, we all must be the sons and daughters of Issachar to know what Israel ought to do.

Fourth, Okay, the simplest thing I could say is obey Christ. So that’s where we begin. Obey all that he has commanded us even as he is with us always. And fifth then is derivative from that. Preach the gospel, teach the scriptures. Those are commands given to Christ church under all conditions at all times. In that case, we don’t need the sons of Issachar to tell us what to do because Christ himself and the apostles have told us what to do similarly, sixth, love and serve the church.

The confusion is always that we will see the passing thing as permanent and see the permanent thing as passing. The most important thing for us to understand is that the church is eternal. It’s not just permanent, it is eternal. We are to serve the church and love the church.      Seventh, the biblical admonition deeply rooted in the people of God and the Old Testament. And in the new we’re to grow in grace, in knowledge, in wisdom. That’s why you’re here, and unapologetically so, that’s why this faculty’s here unapologetically so. It is so that together we may grow in grace, grow in knowledge, grow in wisdom to serve the church, to be faithful to Christ.

Okay, let me get personal. Eighth, show the glory of God in marriage.

Now, I want to state very clearly that the scripture says that there are those who are to be honored, who are given the gift of celibacy for service to the church and to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we need to call out and celebrate and honor those who are given that gift. At least judged by the history of the Christian Church, very few of you have been given that gift. Alright, so with that in mind, if you have not been given that gift, get busy. Yes, this is about as counter-cultural going to hear. I don’t know of any other president of any similar institution who would say it so strongly. One of the biggest ways you can push back in faithfulness is to be married to the glory of God early if the Lord allows and long, okay, if that one was controversial, the next one’s going to be worse.

Have babies, lots and lots of them through the glory of God. As I often concede when you look at the cultural challenge, we may not be able to outmaneuver them. We may not be able to out strategize them, but we can clearly outbreed them and that is to the glory of God. I want to tell you one of the happiest things when I see a gospel church, is just seeing babies, children, all this to the glory of God. And I just wanted to encourage college students, I know, I know, I know how young you are ,and I know how distant some of this can seem, but you need to grow up fast. And there’s a timeline that the Lord will allow in which all these things can happen. I just want to tell you, seize the good things God has given us and defy the wisdom of the world. Show the glory of God even in the institutions of creation. Order to God be the glory.

Tenth, finally, know that we are called to a long faithfulness, but the time is short. Sounds like a contradiction, perhaps even an oxymoron. We’re called to a long faithfulness, but the time is short. But long faithfulness means that living it, it’s long, but at the end of the day, the time is very short. So somehow we have to put those two things together. The age is short. The faithfulness is to be long. And of course, by God’s grace that faithfulness is not just in this life, but for Christ’s people glorified in the age to come. We’re not there yet, but Jesus is coming. May he when he comes, find his church faithful. And may that faithfulness begin in us renewed even today by the word of Scripture. Let’s pray. Father, we are so thankful for all you’ve given us in your word. We pray that to your glory, we will live that our faithfulness by your grace may be long even as the time is short. Even so, Lord consecrate this term, maximize our faithfulness. And even so, Lord, come quickly. Amen.

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“Oh, to grace, how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be.” Isn’t it amazing how we sing the faith. Sometimes, especially with a classic hymns, we sing the faith, with a power, with a concision, and with joy. It’s one thing to read it on the page and to know it’s true. It’s another thing to sing it. It’s yet another thing to sing it in the presence of other Christians and to hear Christian voices singing in unison that we are all debts to grace. We’re daily constrained by the fact that we are saved by grace.

I want to extend my personal welcome to those of you who are here. Of course, we welcome all for to this service and are thankful that you are with us. I’m particularly thankful for the Southern Seminary Foundation here. I mentioned on Tuesday, our governing board is the board of trustees elected by the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention, and they can serve 10-year terms. You know, that’s a long time for someone to give to a calling, a stewardship like this, 10-year term. That means many, many, many days over a course of years serving on this board of trustees. The sentence for the term for a foundation participant may be decades. My heart is filled, and Mary with me, that with so many of these folks who are here for the Southern Seminary Foundation, they have been instrumental in what the Lord has done here for 30, and 30 plus, years. That’s an amazing thing. I want to urge you in the room who are young – and there are many of you, most of you, it’s impossible by definition for most of you to have had any friend for 30 years, a fraction thereof – I just want to encourage you, pray for friends who will be friends to you in Christ for a lifetime. Pray to have friends that will mean so much to you. You’ll share their joys. You’ll share their sorrows. You’ll learn from each other. You’ll keep each other faithful, encourage one another to faithfulness. You’ll exalt in each other’s children. I just want to encourage that today, and this week, is one constant reminder of that on this campus, and I just want to boldly say, I wish this for all of you. Those who are here for the preview conference for Boice College. I just want to give you, and extend, my personal welcome – just absolutely thrilled that you are here. I pray the Lord will use this time, not just in this service but your time on this campus, to move your heart to know what you should do or your loved one should do as you think about the course of higher education to the glory of God for service to Christ. And we pray, of course we think we know the answer to your prayer, but we want you to find where the Lord would want you to be most faithful and ready for a lifetime of faithful service. So, I look forward to meeting you as well.

Our opportunity right now is to meet God’s word, to be confronted by God’s word, to hear God speak. And I want to direct you to the book of Romans, chapter twelve, and in particular to the most familiar verses in this text in chapter twelve, verses one and two. The Holy Spirit speaks through the Apostle Paul, “I appeal to you, therefore brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” I’m thankful for God’s Word.

For the experience of my Christian life, beginning when I was a teenager, this text has seized me. And when you know that a text has seized you, you come back to it again and again and again to be seized yet again and again and again. I’ve come back to this text today because of a certain current perplexity. One of the realities of God’s Word, living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, is that you never exhaust it. You’re always learning more about it. You learn, first of all, intertextual connections, and all of a sudden you realize this connects to this, connects to this, connects to this. This is very important for the Evangelical Protestant, and, we think, proper Christian understanding of how to read the Bible. We read the Bible in the context of the entirety of the canon of scripture, the books of the Old Testament and the books of the New Testament. We read it in terms of an overarching story of promise and fulfillment, an overarching narrative which gives the structure to Scripture of creation and fall and redemption and new creation. We understand as Christians that every single word of Scripture points to Christ. But it is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, so it will surprise us, and sometimes it takes a certain controversy to awaken us to something we should have seen.

The remarkable first force of Romans chapter 12:1-2 is the language Paul uses, “I appeal to you, therefore, brothers.” That’s one of the strongest exhortations a Greco-Roman speaker could use. He’s making an appeal. This is not something that begins the kind of speech in the Greco-Roman world, and the ancient world, especially influenced by Greece and Rome. When you get to “therefore,” you’ve already said quite a bit, “therefore” is the turning point in the argument. This is when things are getting intense. It’s also when things are going to get concrete and specific. I think the folks who look to this text, and by the time you get to the renewal of the mind and discerning what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect, I think this is what the Puritans try to describe as practical reason. And then in the entire English speaking philosophical tradition, the emphasis upon practical reason, this is it. This isn’t intellectualism, this is practical reason. This is the right operation of reason, which is corrupted, that is reason corrupted by sin, but we are rescued by Scripture and thus our minds are transformed. It’s the transforming of the entire body, the entire self, but it’s specifically here, just unapologetically, specifically referring to the renewal of the mind.

It begins, of course, in chapter twelve, verse one, with Paul’s appeal, “therefore” – on the basis of everything he said. Well, on the basis of how much he said? Well, the entirety of the book of Romans. In one sense, the right way to see Romans is to understand that you have this incredible manifesto of thick doctrine – thick, not thin – very thick presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And of course, we’re taken into some of the mysteries of the Christian life made visible to us. So much is explained, and there are “therefore”‘s before this “therefore” in the book of Romans. But this “therefore” at chapter twelve, when Paul says, “I appeal to you, therefore,” he’s using that rhetorical device to say, “on the basis of everything I’ve said,” how much of it, all of it, “on the basis of what I have said up till now – only now can I say what I need to say at this point.”

And so what does Paul need to say at this point? Well, I spoke of practical reason. It’s a turning point in the book for practical instruction, practical Christianity – “present our bodies as a living sacrifice.” And of course, the sacrificial system very much in mind, that there’s no such thing as a living sacrifice in the animal sacrifice world. You never meet an animal survivor of the altar. It just doesn’t happen. And so a living sacrifice is one of those oxymorons, two words which put together certainly get our attention because this redefines the entire thing. There’s no more sacrifice of death, as the book of Hebrews will tell us, because Christ died once for all for the redeemed, there is no perpetual sacrifice, there is, instead, an eternal gospel. But there’s still a sacrifice of a sort, and of a fundamentally important sort, snd it’s the sacrifice of self, ego, and the false ideas that had held us captive, to present our bodies as the totality of ourselves, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship. It’s our right response. It demonstrates our worship. It’s one thing to say we are worshiping Christ, it’s another thing to live as his, and it is that to which we are called. How’s that going to happen? Verse two, “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” So there’s a very clear dichotomy. We’re going to go one way or the other. We’re going to be marked by one condition or the other. We will either be conformed to the world or we will be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Those are stark alternatives. And then, and only then, will we discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

When I was a teenager, I was trying to figure out what in the world was going on around me. I was by circumstances of my life, my family moved from one town to another. And it was, at the time, like moving from one world to another. The world I had known up through the seventh grade was a world of basically settled things. The world that I knew in the eighth grade was a profoundly unsettled world. As I sometimes say, I moved from Mayberry to Metropolis – there is a difference. The new world I inhabited in the eighth grade was a world of progressivist educational theory, modern sociology. As I tell people, the school was just remarkably different. You know, in the school I had up through the seventh grade, they had people known as teachers and they were in charge of the classroom and their responsibility was to teach. And we were in a classroom, had walls, had a door. That was your home where you learned. And you sat in rows of desks, calmly, in right order. Disorder was not encouraged, it was punished. I will say that children thrive on order. It was a great experience. I knew teachers, teachers were in authority. I loved teachers. I loved learning. I loved knowing what learning was about. I loved, even as a child, when I didn’t know anything about curriculum, lesson plans, educational philosophies, I loved it when I knew the teacher was mastering the subject and was doing his or her best to help us to learn and to master the subject – and I wanted more. And then there was always a new grade with a new teacher, and new books. In the eighth grade I arrived in chaos, and not only that, these teachers were weird. They didn’t seem to know so much, but they really wanted us to be happy. Big self-esteem stuff going on. “You are so smart.” You haven’t taught us anything, how do you know if we’re smart or not? “I don’t know. We don’t know anything.” Discipline? “Oh, that’s oppressive. We want middle schoolers to express themselves.” And of course, the obvious response to that is, no, you don’t. No, you don’t. Teachers were facilitators, they weren’t really teachers because that’s an authoritative position. And so they didn’t teach, they facilitated. And here’s another lesson I learned, as a 13-year-old, facilitators may do many things, one thing they do not do is facilitate. The motto of the progressive educators in that day was – sounds like hippies from the sixties because they were hippies in the sixties – “No more sage on the stage, man, now just a guide on the side.” It wasn’t much guiding either. I was totally frustrated. And not only that, I had two teachers who were atheists. Now, religious diversity that I’d known before included Presbyterians, and so this is a fundamentally different category. These people are past Episcopalians. The Episcopalians have been trying to catch up with them, but that’s another story. But you know, this is tough stuff here. I got people who don’t believe in God, and then everything else is breaking loose at the same time. Everything’s breaking loose – the sexual revolution, the gay rights movement which started in south Florida in the early 1970s. It was a huge thing. I was in the meeting with my parents at the Miami Beach Convention Center where Anita Bryant, who had been Miss America, and very well known, she had called together – she was kind of a catalyst for pushing back against a gay rights ordinance, and successfully so by the way – and at that event, at the Miami Beach Convention Center – and, you know, my family and folks in my church very concerned about this, wanting to know about this – there was a big bus out front and it had a choir in it that had traveled, and the choir sang, and the preacher of that church – which nobody had ever heard of – named Jerry Falwell, he got up and spoke, and I don’t know who this guy is, never heard his name, but he’s evidently preached before – this is pretty strong – and Anita Bryant sang, and we all affirmed the biblical truth and the necessary actions from biblical truth, and went home. It was very impressive. I can tell you almost where we were sitting and what was happening. I was pretty astounded by the whole thing. But no dots were connected. Nothing. In other words, I didn’t understand. I left there not understanding why there were people who were across some kind of chasm. I mean, their entire view of life is just fundamentally different than ours, but I don’t have any categories for that. I don’t have any way to look at that. And that’s when I was introduced as a teenager to the idea of the Christian worldview, and the necessity of Christians thinking consistently with biblical truth, and that that created and constituted a world and life view that that was very fundamental to everything else. As you think, so you will act. As you think, so you will live. So we’ve got to give attention to how Christians should think Christianly, and you know you only do that – honestly, this is just human nature – Christians only do that when we have to. And we certainly have to when, all of a sudden, we’re surrounded by people who operate from a very different worldview, a comprehensive understanding of life. It helped me enormously. I told the story many times. It was a figure by the name of Francis Schaefer who had this enormous influence because he was writing about just what I was worried about. He was writing about, and speaking about, the crisis I was confronting. You know, you have the collision between two worldviews, and the people who were teaching who were facilitating – whatever they’re doing – they’re operating, the atheist, they’re operating out of a relatively consistent worldview. They, at least in their own minds, have some degree of coherence – things hold together. In other words, they’re not just atheists when it comes to if there is a god, they’re atheist when it comes to if there is a morality.

I was able to start connecting some dots. There was a great chasm between these rival worldviews. Christianity comes with a worldview. And you need to understand that many Christians, I think most Christians, I can say decisively, that most Christians in the United States, up until something like the 1970s never talked about anything like the Christian worldview, because we didn’t have to talk about it when everybody agreed with us. Even people who weren’t Christians were operating out of basically Christian worldview. It took developments to bring an alternative worldview, that was behind the sexual revolution, behind personal autonomy, behind situational ethics, behind abortion, behind the gay rights movement, as it was known then, and it was, all of a sudden, now coherent. You can understand, here’s the Christian worldview based in scripture, and it begins with the pre-existent, self-existent God of glory, and the works of God in creation. It points to creation order as fundamental. This is not just a story for our interests, this is actually the revelation of the very meaning of the cosmos and of human life and of all things visible and invisible in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, right down to “therefore man shall leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Right down to “be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.” Right down to the imago dei. Right down to the distinction between human beings made in God’s image and all the other creatures as part of the glory of God’s creation. The distinctions in creation absolutely as essential as the declarations of creation. I came to understand that, and I lived in it, I seized on it. Over the course of evangelical history since then, just about anywhere you find seriously minded, evangelical Christians, seriously minded believers under these conditions with the challenges around us, Christians have learned to speak of the worldview of the Christian worldview, of a biblical worldview, the comprehensive view of life to which we are committed, and out of which comes all of the basic decisions, we will make judgments. The recovery of worldview understanding was a massive gift to evangelical Christianity. And thus you have institutions and you have churches and pastors and you have professors and you have authors and others, and they’ll say it is the Christian duty, it is the Christian responsibility to develop a truly biblical comprehensive world and life view, summarize this by saying the Christian biblical worldview.

Recently, just in the course of the last few years, there has been a pushback against this. There are authors who are suggesting that it was a detour or at least a false start or something inadequate that Protestant evangelical Christians have become so concerned about worldview. Now, there were pushbacks like this in the 70s. There were pushbacks like this in the 80s and the 90s, and I’ve been able to witness them unfold. And most of it, at least in the beginning, was coming from basically theological liberalism, or an effort to try to define Christianity without doctrine, without specific truth claims. It was at the expense of the authority of scripture, and it basically was at the expense of the entire Christian faith. It got to the point where liberal Christianity during those days had reduced all the Bible to be sweet and vote democratic, basically. But we couldn’t do that. There was this clash of worldviews and there were people who said we don’t have to make the distinction so stark. Because even when you talk about the Christian worldview, and when you talk about the atheistic secular worldview, or when you’re specific about alternative contrasting worldviews to Christianity – if it’s existentialism or situationism or it could even be a variant, a Hindu worldview or an eastern or an Asian worldview based upon very different understandings of history, very different understandings of life – and some were saying we’ve got to respect other worldviews and, almost kind of like a National Geographic, we need to be thankful for other worldviews. Just let me just point out, you can’t be a faithful Christian and be thankful for other worldviews. You can’t be a faithful Christian and be thankful for idols. You can’t be a faithful Christian and say it doesn’t matter. So it was pretty much a liberal/conservative thing. And I’ll be honest, for most of the last several decades, the debate of the Christian worldview has been largely a liberal/conservative thing where the liberals were saying we need to think more like the world, and the conservatives were saying we need to think less like the world. You know, we agree that water’s wet, but we don’t even agree with why there’s water or why it’s wet or what it means.

Alright, over the course of the last several decades, a lot of people developed the understanding of the Christian worldview and really helped Christians to see more clearly and to connect more dots. That’s one of the fun, fulfilling aspects of the Christian life – the older you get, the more you learn, the more you give yourself to learning, the more dots get connected, and that’s very satisfying. They’re those “aha” moments when all the things you say, well, okay, now I understand this. If I truly believe that God’s the author of life, and if I truly believe that God says, “Let there be life,” when human life begins, then I can’t possibly endorse in any way the destruction of unborn human life, and not only that, I have to recognize a human person made in God’s image as deserving the full protection of the entire society because of the sanctity of that life from the moment of fertilization all the way, not only until birth, but all the way until natural death. And Christians, under other intellectual social conditions, didn’t have to think it through all the way to a sentence. You go to a someone in Europe in the 16th century, you don’t even have to have an elaborate argument, everyone agrees with you. It’s when you’re in the presence of those who don’t agree with you, when you see the clash of rival worldviews, that’s when things get hot.

Lately there’s another wave of attack upon a concentration on a biblical worldview or a Christian worldview. It’s pretty assertive. It’s coming in the form of books that are gaining traction and books addressed to Christians saying that the Christian worldview is, some are arguing, kind of a detour from faithful Christianity, and some are saying it’s inadequate, it’s not enough on its own, and there are others who are saying it polarizes because of the fact it shows the polarities, it shows the divisions, it shows the antithesis – that’s a good Christian worldview term – and emphasizes the antithesis rather than indicating what we share in common with people who have other worldviews, instead, Christian worldview thinking tends to accentuate where we have differences, and so missiologically, morally, theologically, spiritually, the Christian worldview as a concern is a diversion and perhaps a waste of time compared to some other approach. Well, I’ve been aggravated by these books. It may show. I have been frustrated with these books, I think some of them, and I’m thinking of one in particular, I don’t think it honestly presents how the concern for Christian worldview among evangelicals emerged and how it functions. I’ll be honest, I don’t know how you can be a faithful Christian in this age and not pretty much every waking hour be committed to believing and living through a Christian worldview in the lens of biblical Christianity, understanding we do live in the midst of a giant antithesis. There’s one part of their critique, though, that I think has traction. And so even though their ambition may be to try to shift evangelical concern to something other than a biblical worldview, that is what I profoundly do not want to do. One critique, one dimension of the critique upon reflection, I think does have some traction.

You look at Romans chapter twelve, look at verse two, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” So you have the rival worldviews. It’s made very clear here. You see the confrontation, you see the thesis and the antithesis. And it’s interesting that Paul begins rhetorically with what we are not to do – very common in the Greco-Roman speaking rhetorical tradition. It’s common also in the Old Testament in passages. Don’t do that. Do this. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. The default is to be conformed. It takes no effort to be conformed to the thinking around us. That just comes naturally. It’s seductive. It’s culturally driven by dynamic of agreement. The easiest thing is just to go along, no doubt about that. The easiest thing is to think like everyone around you thinks, meaning the society. That’s the easiest thing. But Paul says, that’s what you can’t do. And what Paul is talking about here is the entirety of what he said in the book of Romans. And we know that because he said, “therefore,” on the basis of everything that came before. And what came before is this declaration of God’s saving work that was accomplished through the substitutionary atonement accomplished by the Son as part of the Father’s will from before the creation of the world to redeem a people through the blood of the lamb. It is ours by grace. We’re saved by grace alone in, in Christ alone. Therefore, don’t be conformed to the world.

The gospel is effectively betrayed when Christians live like worldlings. It’s a repudiation of the power of the gospel. And Paul is so intent on demonstrating the power of the gospel. It is the power of God unto salvation to all who believe to the Jew first and also to the Greek, to the Gentile. The power of the gospel is betrayed by those who are conformed to the world. So that’s important for us to know. You betray Christ when you’re conformed to the world. You betray Christianity, you betray God, you betray the gospel when you are conformed to the world. And in order not to be conformed to the world – what is Paul’s positive exhortation – be transformed by the renewal of your mind. So the opposite of being conformed to the world is not just being conformed to something else, it’s far more powerful than that. It’s transformation, the transformation of our minds. It’s the transformation of our totality. “But be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Now that renewal of the mind, I think it is just undeniably intellectual, cognitive. It’s based in truth, based in God’s revelation. It’s based on the truths of the gospel that Paul’s been articulating so symphonically in the first eleven chapters of Romans, it ends, by the way, with this phenomenal doxology in verse thirty-three of chapter eleven. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom of God. How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways. For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor, or who has first given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” That verse, verse thirty-six, is one of the most comprehensive you can find anywhere in scripture. Paul brings that portion of his argument together with a declaration that everything comes from God, everything is from him, everything holds together through him, all things teleologically, that is in the end of all things, the thing to which they are pointed is God. They came from him through him and all things eternally will glorify him, be accountable to him, to him be glory forever. Amen. Then Paul says, “I appeal to you brothers, by the mercies of God to present your body the totality of who you are as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

So I said I think there’s one issue that has traction. I think there’s one critique that does have traction, and that is the critique that the Christian worldview, if we’re not careful, look each other in the eye, if we don’t remind ourselves that it’s not a mind game, then we can turn it into one. Okay? So what do I mean by that? I mean, it is possible that there are people who operate out of a Christian worldview who aren’t Christians. And actually we know that. And in the society around us, one of the reasons why you didn’t have to talk about so many of these things, and now you have to talk about them in an urgent way, even with your own neighbors, is because even if your neighbors weren’t believing, regenerate Christians, faithful Christians in a local church, they still basically held to so many of the same judgments based upon the revelation of God in scripture. I mean, they may not have known Christ, but they did know male and female. They may not have known Christ, but they had a clear, innate knowledge that was also affirmed by cultural authorities of what marriage was. And so basic morality influenced by Christianity channeled through Western civilization, it led to a situation in which most people basically agreed with us on most things, even without the gospel, and they don’t anymore. Christians are marked by belief in these things, but not just that. I’m saying I believe we need to hear critics and take them seriously. We need to know. If we are at fault, if something’s lacking in our understanding, then let’s fix that. If there’s something lacking in our faithfulness, let’s fix that. And so I want to say, I think one of the critiques of Christian worldview thinking and Christian worldview teaching, that is that now marks our time, it’s people who say it’s not enough merely to believe these things, it’s not enough merely to know these things, it’s not enough merely to give affirmation to these things, if it’s separated from a faithful Christian life. I can’t refute that argument.

For the sake of time, I want you to turn with me to the book of Ephesians, chapter four. Let’s try to connect some dots. Beginning in chapter four, verse seventeen, we read from the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians by the Holy Spirit, through Paul to us, “Now, this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their blindness, their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learn Christ, assuming that you heard about him, and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirits of your minds and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” We could continue in that passage, but for the sake of time, this is the other place Paul talks about the renewing of the mind. So understanding that we are to interpret scripture by scripture, this is really going to help us. You take Romans 12, and you take Ephesians 4, Paul points us to the renewing of the mind in both of these passages. This is the same apostle speaking of the same Christ, preaching and defending and teaching the same gospel, but it’s a little different here in this context. The passage is a little longer. The context is slightly different. Here in Ephesians 4, Paul writing to the Ephesians in the context he’d been talking about, the body of Christ, he gets very practical, and this has to do with how Christians live. He writes to those Christians in Ephesus and says, “Now, I’m going to tell you this. I’m testifying in the Lord.” Strong words here. He says, “You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do. There was a day when you walked just like the world walks. Remember, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Here you have Paul say, “You can’t continue being conformed to the Gentile way of life, which once you knew ,a pagan way of life, which once you knew.” And so there’s an incredible parallelism in this. There’s a symmetry here. Paul’s giving us more. In Ephesians 4, speaking of the Gentiles, he says, “They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart.” They’re darkened in their understanding. They’re living out their worldview. They are. We all do. They’re living out their most basic beliefs. You may call them unbeliefs, they’re living out their unbeliefs which function as their beliefs. They live out consistently. What are their moral principles? Well, how do they live? What is their understanding of life? How do they think? How do they live? And you notice Paul here speaks to Christians as those who once were similarly alienated and darkened in understanding. He attributes it to human sinfulness, the hardness of their heart. Look at verse 19, “They become callous.” Notice the moral point here, “They have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.” Okay? So, so now we understand that the worldview, the secular worldview, the unbelieving worldview, the pagan worldview that once marked, not only the world, but also those who, until the gospel walked in the same way, it’s due to darkness, it’s due to the hardness of heart, and it’s demonstrated in how they live. They give themselves up to every kind of sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

Then Paul says, “But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you heard about him, and we’re taught in him as the truth is in Jesus.” He speaks of putting on and putting off. It’s not, in this case, just no longer are you conformed to the world, you’re to be transformed by the renewing of your mind, in this graphic language here in Ephesians 4, Paul speaks of the same process of the same requirement for Christians as a putting off of an old self and a putting on of Christ, that the old belongs to your former manner of life and is described as corrupt through deceitful desires, and instead, here’s the renewing, “and be renewed.” That’s the contrast. “Be renewed in the spirit of your minds.” We’re to put on a new self, created after the likeness of God. And notice what’s said here, “in true righteousness and holiness, as God is righteous and as God is holy, so his people are to be also.” And so you notice here, this is about Christian truth. This is about the necessity of doctrine. This is about how we are to think, but it’s translated into how we live. So much so, that the distinction between the pagan, the former Gentile existence, and the Christian existence is in the fact that the sensuality and the immorality and the going after every immoral thing that marked the past for the believer cannot mark the present. So much so that it’s a putting off of the old self and a putting on of a new self. It’s a transformation. What does Romans 12 look like? Well, Ephesians 4 helps us to see that what it is to fulfill, what it means to prove what is the will of God, that which is good and excellent and perfect, it is so transformative. It is so distinct that it’s like taking off one self and putting on another self. We are dead to self and alive to Christ, transformed by the gospel.

But notice again, verse 23, and to be “renewed in the spirit of your minds,” as in Romans 12, “by the renewal of your minds.” Transformed by the renewal of your minds, here also, renewed in the spirit of your minds. Okay? What I want share with you is the fact that sometimes our critics have a point.

Let me tell you what they’re not right about. They’re not right when they assert that a focus on the Christian worldview is wrong, they’re not right. We can’t be faithful as Christians, we can’t even experience the renewal of our minds unless that means that based upon the truth of God’s word, the power of the gospel, we are holding consistently to God’s truth and learning how not only to think as Christians, but to live as Christians. So that gets to the next point, and that is that there are people who might basically agree with the Christian worldview who are still basically dead in their sins and trespasses. And there are some who would say, “I hold to this entire system of truth,” but in their moral lives, they betray it. Paul here doesn’t just say, “Exchange one ideological understanding for another.” He doesn’t say, “Exchange this set of ideas for that one. All’s done.” He says, “Put off the old self, put on a new gospel self.” I think that’s exactly what he says in Romans 12.

What I want to say is, I am not only as committed to the importance of the Christian worldview and to Christian worldview education and Christian worldview understanding as fundamental to what it means to be a faithful Christian in this age. I not only believe that as emphatically or more emphatically than ever, but I also believe it’s not enough just to say, you have to think differently. It’s good to be reminded if only the claims of Christ change how we live as profoundly as how we think. Put off the old self, put on the new self. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It is all to the glory of God. And we would be lost to understand any of this if God didn’t love us enough to make it clear. I pray this morning that the truth of God’s word will penetrate the hardness of our own hearts and to the glory of God and for faithfulness in Christ’s church, we will be conformed to His image, not just in how we think, but, yes, in how we think, made evident in how we live to Christ’s glory.

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Third Avenue Baptist Church

Louisville, KY

1 Corinthians 13:1–13

October 12, 2025

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Good morning. I greet you all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. What a privilege to look out and see you this morning. What a privilege to sing such words together this morning and a personal word of welcome to all of you who may be visiting with us today. We are thrilled you are here. We turn now to the preaching of God’s Word, and I invite you to turn with me to Paul’s first Corinthian letter in the New Testament appropriately identified as, some would say, One Corinthians, the British. We will stick with First Corinthians.

I’m going to begin reading at verse 10. “I appeal to you brothers by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no divisions among you but that you be united in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. What I mean is that each one of you says, ‘I follow Paul or I follow Apollos’ or ‘I follow Cephas’ or ‘I follow Christ.’ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I think God that I baptized none of you except Christus and Gaius so that no one may say you were baptized in my name. I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that I do not know whether I baptized anyone else. For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel and not with words of eloquent wisdom lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discerning of the discerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where’s the scribe? Where’s the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews  demand signs and Greek seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards.

Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth, but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not to bring to nothing. Things that are so that no human being may boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” (1 Cor. 1:10-31). This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. An incredible passage. It’s one of the key texts in Scripture for me that defines the gospel in my entire understanding of the New Testament and furthermore of biblical theology. It’s one of those texts that caught me early in life, and has captivated me ever since.

I returned to it in my mind over and over and over again. It’s like a touchstone. It’s there when I read another text, I think of First Corinthians chapter one when I hear a conversation, I think of First Corinthians chapter one. As I’m reading the history of the Christian Church over and over again, I will see something and it makes me think of First Corinthians chapter one. More commonly, I read criticisms and denials of Christianity and what I see is First Corinthians chapter one, I hear empty religious chatter that is pseudo Christianity and what echoes in my ear is First Corinthians chapter one. Now there are other key texts, Romans chapter one, John chapter one, passages that just grab a hold of me and ever since I was very young have a firm grip on me. They’re like columns on the portico of my house of theology.

These particular texts, they call me back, time and time again. Of late, I have been thinking about one dimension in this text that due to circumstances has come very much to mind. I wanted to read the entirety of that passage, and of course we could have begun in the very beginning of the letter for the sake of time. I didn’t begin with Paul’s greetings and I didn’t speak of his warmth to the Corinthian congregation. The background of this, however,  is his pastoral concern about the Corinthian congregation because of the divisions in the church, trouble in the church, confusion in the church, you know that we’re skipping over that to get to Paul’s unbelievable apostolic declaration that follows. It’s contextual. All of Paul’s letters are contextual. It’s one of the reasons why we call this the Corinthian correspondence. First and second Corinthians, we know there were other letters because Paul makes reference to them, other letters to Corinth.

This letter is tied to Corinth. It’s a specific community. Yes, more importantly it’s a specific congregation. They’re in the early church, but the Holy Spirit intended for the church throughout the ages to have this text as Holy Scripture. Where we began, Paul’s making an appeal, and there is a shift in the passage. He’s making an appeal for unity in the faith, unity in the gospel of Jesus Christ precisely because there is disunity, and it’s a disunity that threatens the witness of the church and the preaching of the church. There’s a certain kind of disunity that doesn’t pose a horrifying problem.

I mean we can differ on some of our understandings of eschatology. I think in common we must understand an historical, physical, victorious, bodily return of the Lord Jesus Christ in glory to judge the nations and to fulfill all Scripture. But when I was a very young evangelical Christian, I heard people offering different understandings of exactly how might that happen, and I quickly determined that the pre millennialist were right, and I stand on that. But I quickly discovered that I had friends who saw otherwise, friends in the gospel, friends with deep substance, faithful friends.  There could be eschatological positions that would threaten the unity of the church. But there are all kinds of different, we could have an entire seminar in this room with some very fruitful discussion, come in as friends and leave as friends, come in united in the gospel and leave united in the gospel. But there are other doctrines, there are other issues of which that is not true. They’re far closer to the center of the Christian faith. Confusion or division on these things would be fatal. But it’s not just doctrine, it is the entirety of the life of the church.

Churches will find just about anything to argue about. That’s human nature. You drive down streets. I enjoy telling students, I could take you down a street in Louisville and tell you what is memorable about that church, and often it’s not peace. And some fights are worth having, and there’s stories on that too. You can look down and there’s  First church, Second church, Third and a quarter church. We can divide in so many different ways and you just say, okay, there’s a story there. Maybe that was important and necessary, maybe it wasn’t.

One of the things that I find so helpful in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence is that he weighs the heavy things versus the less heavy things. The heaviest thing of all is the most glorious thing of all, which is the saving gospel of Jesus Christ. The most important thing of all, the glorious saving cross of Christ is at the center of what Paul would have us to see here. He directs attention of the church to the cross, unflinchingly to the cross, unfailingly to the cross, consistently to the cross. If there is an issue of division, stop that. Look to the cross. Before you go any further, go to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, be reminded of what God has done for us in Christ. Be reminded of what happened on the cross. Be reminded of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ by which we are saved. He doesn’t say the other things aren’t important. There are many chapters following this in an entire letter following this, but let’s get this straight. If we get the gospel wrong, everything is wrong and nothing else matters.

But as I say, in recent days I’ve been thinking about a particular portion of this text, and that is verses 20 through 25. Paul asked the rhetorical question, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is he? Where is the debater of this age? Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Just stop there for a moment. In verse 18, Paul declared, “For the Word of the cross is folly, it’s foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those of us who are being saved, it is the power of God.”

And then in verse 20, he says, If you ever looked around the church, the church is not made up of scoffers of the cross. The church is also not made up of a certain IQ class. There’s some Ivy League alumni in room, but they’re not here because they’re Ivy League alumni. They’re here because they are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. This is not the faculty club at the University of California at Berkeley. Maybe you’ve noticed. Paul’s saying to the Corinthian congregation, okay, look around yourselves. Nobody got here by IQ test. Nobody got here by worldly wisdom. Now Paul, in the totality of the Pauline theological message to the church, the apostle Paul, when he is at Mars Hill, he will cite their philosophers. He’s not unlearned. He’s very learned. He’s not unwise by worldly wisdom. He is wise, but that is not the wisdom of the cross. That is not the wisdom of the gospel. That is not the wisdom of Christianity.

So Paul just reminds him bracingly and perhaps maybe a little offensively, you guys just don’t look like you got here by being valedictorian. You’re not here because of some academic achievement. You’re not here because of worldly wisdom. You’re not here because you’re one of the debaters in terms especially of the Greco-Roman tradition. I don’t see any Epicureans here. I don’t see any Sophists here. So how did you get here? Is it because of your wisdom? Is it because of worldly wisdom? No, it’s all by grace. It is the wisdom of God, in the foolishness of the cross. In verse 21: “For sense and the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom. It please God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.” Okay? That is one of the most tightly argued sentences and we can skip over the first part to get to the second part.

Let’s not skip over the first part because it’s an incredible sentence structure. For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom. Okay? So God always knew that it would be folly to make himself known through worldly wisdom. Now the wise, we have to use that term in two different senses, don’t we? But we’re not there yet. So wise at this point means worldly wise. There is the wisdom of the cross. There is the of Christianity, the wisdom of Christ and that is above all things to be prized. But here it’s a reference to worldly wisdom.

That’s not how God chose to make himself known. You go to Mars Hill and Athens, where the philosophers are holding court. That’s not  the means God would choose to make himself known. That’s not to say they can’t reach insights. It’s not to say they can’t get anything, right? I mean even the most crazy atheist still knows how to do the math when he is in the drugstore. But in the deepest issues of life, in the revealed truths of the gospel, in the saving power of the cross of Christ, none of us gets there by worldly wisdom. And we’re not kept there by worldly wisdom. We know a wisdom, and it’s a wisdom different than and infinitely superior to the worldly wisdom. And this is why those who are committed to, absolutely steeped in, absolutely immersed in worldly wisdom don’t recognize the wisdom of the cross, and also reminds us of sin and its deceitfulness, and it reminds us of grace and the sovereignty of God, to open our eyes that they may see in our ears that they may hear because otherwise we wouldn’t get there either. Two patterns he mentions, of course you know them.

For Jews to demand signs, miracles, think of a passage like John chapter five and six, but we preach Christ crucified. So the Greeks demand signs or miracles and the Greek seek wisdom. That’s very sophisticated, highly structured argument that they recognize coming from one school or another. They recognize this internal coherence. They recognize it’s intellectual, not only brilliance but beauty just in terms of the aesthetic structure of thought. That’s not the cross. We preach Christ crucified and here’s the problem. It’s a stumbling block to just scandal on. They stumble over it. It’s just too crude. This can’t be how God would do this. And Greeks seek wisdom.

Well, there is a wisdom. The cross is infinite wisdom, but it’s not human wisdom. It’s the wisdom of God, to those who are called, effectual calling, both Jews and Greeks. Christ is the power of God and Christ is the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. Therefore brothers and sisters, we are saved. If that were not true, we would be forever lost in our sins and transgressions. But it is true that the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Alright, I want to look at foolishness a little more closely, and since I am here at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Boyce College, we can dive in a little deeper into foolishness. What happened in chapel this morning? We dove deep into foolishness. I think this text invites us to go on an excursion into foolishness that does take full account of the foolishness of the first century to which Paul makes explicit reference, but it is also a pattern of foolishness that I think we need to detect in the world around us, and in particular in the theological world around us.

We speak because of this text of the foolishness of the gospel, but I think we need to recognize some specific dimensions of that foolishness. People are driving by right now on Lexington Road. There are some people who have enough perception to know maybe just by observation something’s going on in this room, but in their everyday lives they’re not troubled by anything that might go on in this room. We’re living in a time, and you can use different terms for it, but I guess the most available term is secularization. We’re living in a secular age in which most people around us do not have as their constant reference biblical Christianity. And it’s not just that they’re distant from it, they’re alienated from it.

You can’t be just neutral about the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s one of the fundamental errors of human sinful reason is to think that there’s some kind of neutrality when it comes to the cross of Christ. You are either his or you are his enemy. That’s just biblical truth. You either belong to Christ or you are the enemy of Christ. Now it is our task to share the gospel with Christ’s enemies in order that they may believe, and believing, be saved. And we need to remember that the New Testament tells us very clearly that that distinction is clear. We either belong to Christ or we are the enemies of Christ. And that is also humbling to us because that reminds us that until God called us unto Christ and we believed, we were not neutral, we were the enemies of Christ.

I don’t hear people commonly in testimony say, I was Christ’s enemy until I became his. But is that not true? That also means by the way, that in our own pattern we were just as afflicted by the foolishness indicted here as any other. But I want to speak of several patterns of foolishness here in the church, in the pulpit, in contemporary Christian theology, in the Christianity as a thing, a visible, hearable discernible thing. I’m not making an equivalence between that thing and the true church of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is a thing the world thinks is Christianity. It includes a lot of things that are fundamentally not Christian. So we know that. But let’s just think in those terms for a moment. There are things said, preached, argued, asserted that we need to observe carefully.

The issue is, how do you get around the foolishness of the cross? It’s tough to get around. You certainly can’t sing what we’ve been singing, that’s out. You probably don’t want to preach or draw attention to a text that’s too messy, as in bloody, so that’s out. You take the hymnal. Now I need to explain to you, for those of you who aren’t acquainted with the term, that’s a Christian term about a book with hymns printed therein, okay? Used to be of regular necessary service to Christians before the advent of the projector. And so in those days, far, far, far in the past, which explained why there is a rack in the back of the pews here and in which you can still find a hymnal stuck in there in case you haven’t seen one. It’s like going to the Smithsonian Institution for some of you I know, but just do it. It’s fun. And here’s the other thing, it has notes in it and music in it, and I say that I don’t mean it cynically.Honestly, I understand, but I think there’s loss. I think there’s loss.

I will tell you that devotionally, a hymnal is number two for me to Scripture, and it’s because I can turn pages and see hymns that I’ve been seeing since I was a little boy and knew hymns too that are wonderful. And those hymns I can hear in my imagination when I just see them on the page. But you’re going to have to rip all kinds of pages out of that hymnal. You’re going to have to reduce the songs you sing. If you’re not going to sing about the cross, what are you going to sing about? Oh, wait just a minute. You go to a lot of evangelical churches or churches that think they’re evangelical and you’re going to hear a lot of music, you’re actually not going to hear the cross. You’re not going to hear atonement. You’re not going to hear about the blood of Christ. You’re not going to hear about the saving work of Christ. You’re going to hear about self-affirmation disguised as some form of music, worship some form of something.

Lord, aren’t you lucky that I’m here? Aren’t I glad to be here with other people like me? I mean honestly or just, be happy. Now, I don’t want to sound too cynical here because I think there are people who, with Christian knowledge actually hear more in those songs than are there. I was in a setting a couple of years ago where there was a very moving song. It was a very moving song; it was very catchy. It was one of those that you could remember and just think about it in your head until I realized there’s no gospel in it. And so I was talking to someone who was with me who was also very much attuned to these things and we both agreed there are people in this room that are reading more into those words than are there in those words. You can be almost slightly dangerously close to the gospel, and if you know the gospel, you fill in the blanks. The problem is, an awful lot of the people in that room singing those songs aren’t filling in the blanks. They don’t have a clue.

Evasion is the first method. There are those who by evasion in this first method of understanding foolishness, the manifestation of foolishness as evasion, you just don’t talk about the cross. You don’t necessarily deny it. That would be messy. You just ignore it. You just evade it. You just find a way to preach a message somehow without ever getting to the cross. And I mean the cross as God’s decisive event, substitutionary atonement, death of Christ, putting here here the entire saving work of Christ in his death, burial and resurrection, the Father raising him from the dead, or you just hear this as victory.

There’s no atonement at all. It’s simply, hey, first chapter was, we’re lost. Hey, second chapter is, we’re found. Aren’t we wonderful? Lucky people, we’ve been found! How? From what? Saved. How? From what? You wouldn’t know. The method of these is not to look too closely. You don’t want to see how the sausage is made. I mean atonement, that’s messy, right? The gospel’s pretty messy, right? Alright, so just avoid it. Just kind of hint at it. Let people fill in the blanks. The Scripture calls us to gaze upon the cross. That reminds us that it’s possible not to.

Second is domestication. You domesticate the message of the cross. In this case you can talk about the cross, but it’s a thing emptied of its power. I think there are many ways to do this, but of course when we say domestication, we really are kind of making an animal reference. You domesticate a horse. You break it so that it can be ridden by a human being on a saddle. You house break a dog, I think you know what that means, alright? In this case, by the way, the domestication of the cross means when someone actually does, maybe by accident, get deeply into the gospel and get to the cross and to the blood of Christ, it’s as if you came home and the dog had messed on the floor, because it’s offensive to those who do not believe.

There are preachers who almost miraculously escape preaching the cross because, of course if you are determined not to preach the cross, you’ve got a lot of problems, not only in the gospels and not only in the epistles, you’ve got a lot of problem in the Old Testament actually, because we’re talking about things that clearly are pointing to the cross. We’re looking at a sacrificial system that’s clearly pointing towards an ultimate sacrifice for sin. And by the way, if First Corinthians chapter one and if the gospels are bloody, let’s just say the Old Testament is bloodier, pointing to something greater. There are preachers who do everything to domesticate the cross. You can’t completely avoid these texts, so you just try to explain it. You pretty up the cross, and in preaching and in the approach, you just try to make it as pretty as possible. And this is unfortunately more possible than you might think.

Have you noticed that the top of this steeple, there’s not a cross? The top of Norton Hall, there’s not a cross. I had someone ask me one time, why is there no cross? It’s because this institution, even in its architecture, heavily influenced by Puritanism. And one of the reasons that Puritanism reformed Christianity, I’ll just say with the volume turned up, doesn’t have a cross on the top of the building is because you’re going to be putting something up there that looks pretty, and the cross is not to be presented as pretty. So, in New England, puritanism, what did you put at the top of the steeple? Well, a weather vein of course, because it’s useful in the good Puritan sense, it’s useful so you can put it up there. Of course, there are times in which you can say, maybe the institution is waiting to see which way the wind is blowing, which leads to the third method or demonstration of manifestation of foolishness.

How do you respond to the foolishness of the cross and try to get around it? You can try to avoid it by evasion. You can try to domesticate it. The other method I want to point to now is accommodation. You can try to accommodate it and I wanted to keep a parallel structure here, but here I’m talking about theological liberalism. This is what it is. This is how liberalism works. This is how you will know it when you see it, smell it when you discern it. This is how you’re going to know it’s there. It’s because the argument is we have to accommodate Christian theology to the intellectual conditions of the time. We have to accommodate Christianity to the cultural conditions of the time. Friedrich Schleiermacher in the 19th century in many ways, the father of liberal theology said in his lectures to the culture despisers of religion, there’s something you will like here. But to the culture despisers of religion, you don’t bring out a bloody cross. You bring out some kind of elevated morality. You bring out some kind of depth of existential meaning. Of course, the problem is, you got this book, and this book is very problematic, so you got to do something with this book, which is why the heart of theological liberalism is the denial of the true nature of God and the denial of God’s Word, Scripture. But you still even if just emotional attachment and just because there’s a section in the liturgy that says Bible reading, so you got to read it. What are you going to do with it?

When I was a theology student, I came to see what was going on in theological liberalism and the effort to turn the cross into a mere picture of God’s love. Christ is victim, but he’s willing to play the part of the victim just to show us how much God loves us. It was not the father’s intention that the Son be crucified, but nonetheless, in a demonstration of divine love, Christ goes to the cross, and this is why you will find some in theological liberalism, particularly in the early 20th century in the British tradition which is wildly influential in the United States, you would have people who would say it’s a sacrifice of sorts, but it is not substitution. It’s a sacrifice and it’s supposed to be a picture, an extremely moving picture of the love of God towards us and how are we defined? We are God’s children, and this picture is to draw us to Christ. There is no sin, which is a barrier. There’s no holy God as judge. There is no predicament of lostness. It is just the acquisition of additional meaning. Prettify it up. C.H. Dodd, I remember reading him when I was a first year seminary student, making a distinction between propitiation and expiation and you know what you, his professor of New Testament, everybody quoted C.H. Dodd.

But then I started looking at it and realized if this is true, the preaching I have known as the preaching of the cross isn’t necessary or was overwrought, especially in pointing to propitiation. Of course, the problem is  that Paul says that’s exactly what it is. The New Testament says that’s exactly what it is. It is propitiation, not mere expiation. It is the propitiation of a holy and righteous God whose righteous wrath is fully satisfied, his justice as fully satisfied in the atonement accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ. It is not just a washing, it is payment in full, in the substitutionary death of the very son of God.

A lot of theological liberalism has now found a way just to avoid the cross altogether, and some of this has taken place in my lifetime. I think theological liberalism and I mean here, genuine theological liberalism, the real thing, even when I was young, it still had to make some reference to these things. Now it makes no reference to them at all. The year I became president of Southern Seminary, a woman by the name of Dolores Williams, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, so this is for me, this is history. This is when I first stepped into the pulpit here as the president of this institution. The very year, 30 plus years ago, Dolores Williams got up at a conference called Re-Imagining God. Now you got a problem if your conference is entitled, re-Imagining God. But speaking of the cross, she said, “I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff,” and she’s a professor at a theological seminary. We don’t need people hanging on crosses, okay? We don’t, by the way, have people hanging on crosses for our atonement. We have one man on a cross. We don’t need blood dripping and weird stuff.

Just recently a GoFundMe account was started to raise money for an oil portrait of Dolores Williams on the campus of Union Theological Seminary in New York City for “her trailblazing contribution to theology.” Trailblazing, you know what trail she’s blazing, as far away from the cross as you can get, as fast as you can get there, people hanging on those crosses, blood dripping and weird stuff. I can remember as a theology student reading by Harry Emerson Fosdick, whose church was right next door to Union Theological Seminary, the Riverside Church and Harry Emerson Fosdick. I thought his liberalism was that he would say that the cross says bad things about Christians that we’re making too much of it. I was completely shocked when I actually read Harry Emerson fos and Fosdick said, the problem with the preaching of the cross is that it says bad things about God.

It asserts horrible things about the Father because you can’t read the New Testament without understanding that Christ didn’t jump on the cross. He was crucified by the express will of the Father, crucified by sinful men, but by the Father’s will. Second Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake, he made him. That is the Father made the son, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him might become the righteousness of God.” Romans 3:25. Similarly, we come to see this summary of the gospel speaking of Christ “whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.” 

The Father put him forward.It says bad things about the Father. Fosdick said that you would say he would demand blood atonement. No loving father would demand blood atonement, but God Almighty, the eternal Father demanded blood atonement, and he provided blood atonement through the perfect obedience of his son. 

The fourth evasion is psychologization. The therapeutic, and this is again it comes in waves, but even recently we just said the cross will add meaning to your life. You know what? The cross does not add meaning to your life. Sorry. If you say about the cross that it adds meaning to your life, you don’t know the cross. The cross doesn’t add meaning to your life. The cross becomes the meaning of your life in the cross of Christ. I glory at the cross. At the cross we’re drawn back to the cross because the cross is the message of our salvation. It is the saving act of God for our redemption.

The preaching of the cross, and I know this is a little bit dated, but I want to tell you it does come in waves and I sense another wave of this coming. Robert Schuler, now dead, the preacher in Orange County, California in the Crystal Cathedral. I had the opportunity to get to know him. We appeared on some television programs together opposing one another, but he invited me to come to the Crystal Cathedral for a tour and who could turn that down? Robert Schuler, I came to believe, was absolutely sincere. That’s the scary thing I came to believe. He was absolutely sincere and he said “What we need to preach is that the cross simply and exclusively tells you how much God loves you.”

That’s not light years from the preaching of the cross. It’s just sort of the reversal of the preaching of the cross. That’s why it’s so seductive. Yes, it does tell us that God loves us. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whosoever believes in him might not perish but have everlasting life. Yes, it is the love of God made manifest, but it’s not because we’re such wonderful people. Shuler actually turned it around so that the cross is supposed to build our self-esteem. If I can read the New Testament, I don’t think the cross is to build our self-esteem. 

The fifth way is demythologization. See, you get some of you know what that is. You’ve heard about it. If not, you got a new word you can use, demythologization.  The argument that the mythological world of the Bible needs to be simplified, we see through the myth and we see the essence of the thing. Rudolph Boltzmann, the German theologian, he said that the world is driven by different mythical world pictures. Christianity, biblical Christianity points to a specific mythological world picture. He said of the cross that it represents a sacrificial and juristic analysis. He said it has existential meaning. In other words, there’s meaning in there that can apply to us in our modern, hyper-modern situation. We need to encounter the cross. We need to understand there’s a certain revelation in the cross, although it’s an indeterminate revelation. What we should see in it, Bookman said, is authenticity. Authenticity. Do you look at the cross? Do you sing about the cross and say, what I find there is authenticity and by the way, the authenticity of what? The authenticity of basically whatever you want to be authentic. You, be you. So much for take up your cross and follow me. 

Finally, I want to say that I think another evasion of the cross we need to recognize as prosperity theology, and again, this doesn’t go away, it’s just in waves. It’s there. Even recently, we see it on television and we see people who are now being promoted as Christian leaders, and I’ll just tell you, I think they’re false prophets and false prophetesses. I think a lot of it, there’s not enough theology there in the case of some of them to indict them for heresy. But you see it and all around, they’re popular so many places. They got the big tabernacles and temples all over America, but what they preach is simply the reversal of First Corinthians chapter one.

Now, a lot of these buildings, these pulpits, these churches, there’s really no danger of outright heresy because that would require some level of theology. It’s just affirmation. The promise of the gospel is that God loves us and wants us rich, healthy, and wealthy. I wanted to speak from this text this morning just to remind us that when we read First Corinthians chapter one and when we read that the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God, we need to remember that this is as relevant as it was in Corinth when Paul, by the Holy Spirit wrote this letter. It is as relevant to Christian ministry to the preaching of the gospel. It’s as relevant to our own theological considerations, our own gospel analysis as it was when Paul wrote this letter by the Holy Spirit.

If God has called you to preach, he’s called you to preach this gospel, not to pretty it up, but to preach it in all of its power, to preach the cross, to preach it in the simplicity of the message of the cross, but in the power of the message of the cross so that sinners may hear that gospel and believe and believing, be saved. It’s important we recognize whether we are preaching or listening, that every single Christian sermon has to come down to the question. Is this the wisdom of the world or the foolishness of the cross? Because brothers and sisters, fellow sinners saved by grace, it’s going to be one or the other. Father, we are thankful for this Word beyond our own words. Thank you for making us face the gospel. Thank you for inspiring the apostle Paul by your Spirit to make us look squarely at this issue and turn neither to the left nor to the right from the glory of the cross. Father, we pray that you will bless your church in the preaching of your Word. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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