“This Holy Mystery”
1 Corinthians 2:1-16
As you know, life is full of mystery.
The deepest, richest and most complex theories that science can ever come up with highlight the fact that there is still a depth of mystery that goes way beyond it all.
We can study biology and human genetics and know everything there is to know about fertilization, reproduction, pregnancy, birth, and childhood.
Still, when we see our newborn child, two eyes meet ours with a look that seems to say, not “Who are you?” but “So—it’s you!” and we glimpse a mystery that no physical explanation can ever begin to explain.
It’s similar with music.
A physicist can explain what happens when a particular instrument is played.
But why some music makes us want to laugh and cry and dance, why some music is profoundly comforting and some deeply disturbing, is a mystery.
And the deepest mysteries of human life—love, death, joy, beauty and the rest—are some of the deepest mysteries of them all.
I was speaking with the life-skills kids this past week when I asked them “How many of you think there is something wrong with this world?”
Everyone raised their hands.
Some muttered, “This world is messed up!”
Then, I asked, “How do you know this?
Have any of you ever known anything other than this life you are now living?”
Everyone answered, “No.”
Then, I asked, “If this life we are living is all we know.
How in the world do we know it is messed up?
How do we know something is wrong, not right, not the way it should be?”
“How do we know?”
“We haven’t experienced anything else.”
“Could it be that God’s Spirit speaks to our spirits, giving us a knowledge we aren’t even aware we have?
Could it be that we know things are not right in this world because God is telling us so?”
(pause)
We know things are messed up and wrong, but we don’t seem to know how to fix it, do we?
It’s quite a predicament we are in.
It’s quite mysterious.
This is where our Scripture passage for this morning comes in.
Paul tells us that at the heart of the Christian message there is a clue to the deepest mystery of life.
One of the reasons why the mystery of the gospel is a mystery is because nobody in Corinth or most other places would ever think of looking for the secret to life, the universe, God, beauty, love and death in a place of execution outside a city in the Middle East.
That’s why, as Paul says, not only were the Corinthian Christians themselves, for the most part, neither wise, or powerful, but also he himself, when he announced the message to them, found himself in fear and trembling.
Imagine yourself standing up to make a speech in front of a group of people you don’t know and having nothing to say except some stammering words about a strange thing that happened a few years ago that you know sounds crazy but which you happen to be convinced contains the secret to everything.
Would you be nervous?
Think about it; you’d watch the people’s faces and see a lip curl here, an eyebrow lift there, people glancing at one another with knowing looks, shaking their heads not only at the stupidity of what you are saying but at the insult to their intelligence.
And yet there is power in it.
And even though Paul wasn’t using any normal persuasive tricks of the trade, people’s hearts, minds and lives were being changed.
There is truth in it.
It carries its own power—God’s Power—which can and does work even through quite simple and even unimpressive human testimony.
This can be a source of enormous encouragement for those of us who want to share our faith with others, even though we might not consider ourselves great and persuasive speakers.
And this works because the Holy Spirit is the One Who reveals and gives faith to us.
Paul writes, beginning in verse 10: “these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.
For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them?
In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us…
… ‘who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’
But we have the mind of Christ.”
This suggests a very intimate relationship with God.
It’s an internalized connection that somehow involves participating in Christ rather than just outwardly trying to imitate Him.
Having the mind of Christ suggests that the faith God gives us through the Holy Spirit is a sharing in Christ’s own knowledge and love of the Father.
And that is why it is a mystery.
That is why there is power in the message of Christ and Him Crucified and Resurrected.
It is the truth and it pierces our souls.
Faith is a gift from God, even the ability to believe is a gift from God—lest anyone should boast!
God comes to us, through the power of the Holy Spirit and imparts in us spiritual truths.
Another way of saying this is by using the language of Prevenient Grace.
God comes looking for us, like a shepherd searching for a lost sheep, long before we are searching for God.
And God, in His searching and finding, then uses His Spirit to persuade us to return to Him, like the story of the
Prodigal Son.
And as this is happening, God’s Spirit gives us insight, the ability to believe things, things that are foolishness to those who are living by the dog-eat-dog rules of the world, or as Paul writes, “the wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age who are coming to nothing.”
God’s Spirit convicts us, and informs us that things are not as they should be…
…that there is a right way and there is wrong way.
There is evil, and there is good.
There is love, and joy, patience, gentleness, self-control and a peace that surpasses all understanding and is not of this world, and can’t be found in this world--but IS available to us through faith in Christ and Christ alone.
I was the owner of a Rock and Roll Tee Shirt Shop in a Mall.
I had been saved ten years earlier but had gotten off track and had even seemed to have lost my faith when God found me, convicted me and showed me, once again, the Truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
And that Truth, for me, is all about Love.
It’s all about a love for God and people that is impossible to have in this world outside of a relationship with Christ.
And Jesus re-found me, shall we say, when I recognized this love and took a stand for this love in the business that I owned.
And that was when, for the first time, I understood what Paul was talking about in Ephesians Chapter 2.
These words are so real.
Listen to them and see if you can relate: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.
All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts…
…But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead…
…For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.
For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
When I received the gift of faith in Christ from God, when I received it and accepted it and prayed to God for it to be what I commit my life to—I became happy…
…I became transformed…
…I became a completely different person.
My priorities changed.
My outlook changed.
My goals changed.
Many of the things that had been so important to me seemed to be such rubbish.
And love overtook my heart.
That is what it means to have the mind of Christ.
We begin to see things through the eyes of Christ.
We begin to love other people—we experience this—we begin to love and sympathize with other people the way Christ does.
Now, for me, this is a supernatural experience.
It’s a mountaintop, which I very easily lose when something distracts me, when the cares of this world begin eating at me again…
…but it is always there nevertheless.
And that is why repentance is so important and that what we call prevenient grace is something that is happening to us all along the way—all through life.
God is continually looking for us because we are continually getting lost.
Can you imagine the LOVE God has for us?
The patience, the mercy, the grace God bestows?
God never gives up on us.
God never stops loving us, even when we are unlovable or have forgotten all about God.
(pause)
Christian perfection is living on that Mountain of love all the time.
John Wesley defined it as having a habitual love for God and neighbor.
And although Wesley, the amazing John Wesley said that he had experienced Christian Perfection—he admitted to never achieving it in this lifetime.
I have experienced a taste of it too, but I have not achieved it, although, Lord willing I continue to strive for it or as Paul writes in Philippians Chapter 3,
“I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.
…I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.
But one thing I do.
Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.
I press on toward the goal…”
It is, indeed, supernatural.
There is a right way and a wrong way.
And we can choose the right way which is found only in Christ.
I would imagine that many of you in this room have tasted Christian Perfection.
You have, as it says in 1st Peter 2:3, “tasted that the Lord is good.”
And you are on the journey.
But it’s a journey of peaks and valleys.
It’s a journey filled with obstacles, temptations and sin.
It’s a journey in which we easily lose our way.
There is a song in our hymnal called “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”
It’s on page 400.
It was written way back in the 1700’s by a man named Robert Robinson.
You probably know it: “Come, though Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing they grace; streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise…”
There are some other words in the song that go like this: “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.”
One day, Mr. Robinson, the author of the song, was riding on a stagecoach next to a woman who was reading the lyrics.
She turned to Robinson and said, “Oh, the lyrics of this song are so beautiful, I wonder who wrote it.”
Robinson replied, “I know who wrote it.
And oh, how I miss him.”
Robinson had wandered and wandered and had left the Lord he loved.
But, from experience, I know that the Lord never left him.
Repentance, should be a daily, perhaps hourly, experience for Christians.
To repent means to turn around and go the other way.
It means to turn around and follow Christ.
And we all need this.
We all get lost.
We all wander.
But, for those who have been saved, we all know the mystery, we have all tasted it, we all know right from wrong—and we must return to the right again and again and again and again.
It gets easier the longer we do it, the more we mature in our faith, although, even the mature wander.
So, in our Scripture passage for this morning, Paul writes: “We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.
No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.
None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
However, as it is written:
‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived—the things that God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has revealed to us by His Spirit.”
Go into Communion talking about “This Holy Mystery”…
