Man has always had a thirst for knowledge. For centuries man has searched for wisdom as we have strived to increase our knowledge. In Athens, hundreds of years ago, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle spent their time discussing the latest and greatest ideas. Then the Roman Empire gifted the city of Athens with the Hadrian's library, one of the greatest collections of human knowledge in existence at that time.
All of this gathering of knowledge seemed to ultimately be trying to understand the “good life.” Yes, they pursued the virtues of wisdom, but none of the searches were rooted in the wisdom of God. So, the Apostle Paul enters the scene and exposes this deficiency during his visit to Athens and to other Grecian cities during his missionary journeys.
Today, we are no different. People desperately search for advice about how to live, how to make life better, how to achieve the “good life.” As Christians, we understand more fully that it is the Holy Spirit that helps us live in ways that please God. And in the process, we find that living for God is the good life. Let's talk about that this morning. Prayer
I think the mid-20th to the 21st century has been the most remarkable time in history. During this period of time, man has produced an exponential explosion of knowledge. You may have heard the term recently artificial intelligence or AI. Concerns are growing and some are beginning to feel threatened by artificial intelligence. Automation of jobs, the spread of fake news and a dangerous arms race of AI-powered weaponry have been mentioned as some of the biggest dangers posed by artificial intelligence.
But even though the technological advances may be smart and provide an unlimited library of worldly wisdom, none of it can bring lasting fulfillment or meet our deepest needs. Even the brilliant minds that imagine and create all this wealth of knowledge and access to it and then gift it all to the world, even they suffer the same personal and moral deficiencies as the average person. Let's see how the Apostle Paul addressed this issue.
1 Corinthians 2:6-9 – “We do, however, speak a wisdom among the mature, but not a wisdom of this age, or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 On the contrary, we speak God’s hidden wisdom in a mystery, a wisdom God predestined before the ages for our glory.
*******8 None of the rulers of this age knew this wisdom, because if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 But as it is written, What no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human heart has conceived—God has prepared these things for those who love him.”
Verse 9 has always been a verse of anticipation for me. No matter how beautifully we try to describe heaven, we can't even imagine what the Lord has in store for us.
Even though we live in a world that appears more advanced than the first century, the issues raised by Paul are about the same. The hopelessness of it all, even as we are bombarded with knowledge and worldly wisdom that was unimaginable only decades ago, even so all this worldly knowledge has produced a lot of emotional pain and personal meaninglessness.
Frankly, I'm not sure how we as kids in the 1960s ever survived. It's hard to believe some of the things that were normal in the 1960s for us kids. Things that we wouldn't even dream of doing today because of all this new knowledge we have gained. As a kid, we could ride in the front or back seat of the car because most cars didn't even have seat belts. You remember sleeping in the back window of the car on trips? Cigarette commercials where smoking was encouraged and made you tough. Baby cribs that were painted with lead-based paint. Trampolines without nets. I don't think “childproofing” was even a word back then. Most kids had their own BB guns. We played with lawn darts. We rode bikes without wearing a helmet. We walked to and from school alone. We went to our friends’ house's unescorted. Kids chewed sugary bubble gum, ate sugar-filled cereal, and would hang out at the candy stores. Do you remember hitchhikers? We played outside unsupervised all day and we didn't even know what sunscreen was. Our signal to come home was when the street lights came on at night. We drank from a garden hose and played in the water running along the streets after a heavy rain. If we got cut or scratched, mercurochrome, or as we called it monkey blood, would cure it all.
Looking back now we see that we have gained an immense amount of knowledge that prohibits most of what we endured as kids. But in contrast to all of this accumulated knowledge, Christians have access to the fountain of wisdom, the Holy Spirit. He teaches us through our inner being by shining a Divine spotlight on the word of God and illuminating its truth for us. Divine knowledge is far more than just the facts, more than just trivia, and more than technical knowledge that is found on the internet.
Yes, godly wisdom comes through the Holy Spirit. Like the apostles before us, as believers, we have a divine discernment of Scriptures and we have a unique insight into the truth. This is what helps us to know how to live holy lives that are set apart from the rest of the world, even when we find ourselves alone or confused.
I guess we could say that all of this head knowledge doesn't even compare to the heart knowledge that we gain by knowing God in a personal way. And God wants us to use this heart knowledge. When communicating to others using the authority of Scripture, God can use us to speak truth into people's lives. This is an uncommon wisdom and is a mystery to many around us, including many educated, or political, or even some religious leaders.
But as we share this godly wisdom, we need to reject the thought that any of it comes from our own intellectual brilliance. Any valuable insight that we might have is nothing more than a reflection of God. God's word makes it clear that we are incapable of even perceiving the greater things that the Lord has in store for us who love Him.
You may have noticed as I have that as we share this Godly wisdom with our family or with our friends that they tend to shy away from us. But even though we might feel alone, we know that we are never alone.
Do you realize that without Divine wisdom, our ability to perceive truth is actually limited? Where do we get this knowledge? Jesus said:
John 14:26 – “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you.”
I have been told more than once by some that don't seem to know better that the Bible was written by man and can't be regarded as the sacred word of God. Let me try to explain this like this:
Humans are endowed by God with a tremendous brain capacity. It's been shown scientifically that our brains can accumulate and store 2.25 million gigabytes of memory. If you don't know much about computers that doesn't mean a lot to you but our brains have an enormous capacity of memory. It is just a myth that we only use about 10% of our brain. But then again, I have known a few people that I wonder if they even use that much.
God's inspired, infallible, and inerrant word came from the heart and mind of God. You either believe that by faith or you don’t. But it had to be filtered through the brain of a prophet, apostle, or other divinely anointed scribe who wrote it down.
Yes, you're right, man literally wrote it down on paper. So, God used humans in the process of giving us His divine truth. He didn't give it directly to the world. He chose to use select, deeply faithful people to assist in the transmission of His sacred Scripture. The Holy Spirit helped in the process to prevent human error in the text that was written down. So Divine wisdom passed through human writers' minds, and ultimately into sacred, handwritten Scripture. Yes, man wrote the Bible on paper but it was inspired by the Holy Spirit of God.
These Scriptural truths are amazing. They represent the wonder and power of the human brain that God created. But it may come as a surprise that our ability to perceive this truth is greatly limited. That's because, in its natural fallen state, the human brain has great vulnerabilities and mental liabilities. Yes, we are flawed. That is why God used the Holy Spirit to inspire the words for man to write down. But the Spirit is what enables us to help others understand truth.
1 Corinthians 2:10 – 13 – “Now God has revealed these things to us by the Spirit, since the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except his spirit within him? In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
*******12 Now we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who comes from God, so that we may understand what has been freely given to us by God. 13 We also speak these things, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual things to spiritual people.”
What Paul is saying is where the brain can compute ideas, crunch data, and reason, the mind is also capable of discerning spiritual truth and meaning. Without the aid of the Holy Spirit, though, our minds can easily be misled. But with the help of the Spirit of God, the mind of Christ that's within us can help us understand more of God's will.
Before you became a Christian, more than likely you didn't read much of the Bible. That's because even if you tried to read it, you didn't understand what you were reading. I’ve been there. But once you became a Christian, it seems that the words of the Bible started to make sense. It's the Holy Spirit that greatly affects our ability to meditate on truth, interpret Scripture, and discern any errors. This ability is freely available to every believer. We're able to understand the things of God and live them out because the Holy Spirit enables and empowers us.
Now I'm going to go deeper for just a moment so hang on. Something that is commonly misunderstood by people that are unfamiliar with how God fashioned humanity, is the fact that the brain and the mind aren't the same thing. Only persons have minds and identities. This includes God, angels, and humans. So, while the brain is part of the body, the mind is part of what we think of as the spiritual nature of humanity. Basically, we are saying that humans are not merely made of matter, we also have an essence that is spiritual. I hope that makes sense.
As we think about the wonder of how God created us, we have to understand that without the ministry of the Holy Spirit, we would be utterly incapable of understanding the things of God. God imparts the wisdom through His Spirit. With the Spirit's help, God often grants us the ability and opportunity to communicate to others what He has taught us. As He does this, we become sources of blessings to others through helping them understand the deeper truths of God. Much like what I am doing right now. Does that make sense?
In the Gospel of John, chapter 3, we find the story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus and asking Him how he can be saved. Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born again. Nicodemus didn't understand what Jesus was saying because the Spirit had not revealed that to him yet.
But when we accept Jesus as our personal Savior, we are born again. As a believer, we see life in a brand-new way as we view it from Christ's perspective. Has someone ever said to you that going to church you're going to “get religion”? Christian faith is not “getting religion”. That is a radical misinterpretation of the change that Jesus imparts on us at the salvation experience. Becoming a child of God is nothing less than being born from above.
Nicodemus took Jesus's instructions of being born again very literally. He wondered if being born again required a person to enter a second time into his mother's womb. Now think about that for a moment. Nicodemus was a religious leader of that day. If a religious leader with formal training could so terribly misunderstand this truth, it's no wonder people today also get confused. Am I right?
Jesus told Nicodemus that those who believe in Him are “born of water and the spirit.” Being born of water represents our physical birth. Being born of the spirit points to the second birth Jesus described, and this is what is required to become a child of God. When a person becomes a believer, it's as if he or she is given a new set of spiritual eyes. That person can now see the kingdom of God. That individual no longer walks in darkness but now walks in the light and gains a new spiritual perspective.
1 Corinthians 2:14-16 – “But the person without the Spirit does not receive what comes from God’s Spirit, because it is foolishness to him; he is not able to understand it since it is evaluated spiritually.
*******15 The spiritual person, however, can evaluate everything, and yet he himself cannot be evaluated by anyone. 16 For who has known the Lord’s mind, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”
This is going to sound repetitious of what I said last week. But what Paul is saying is this. Those that haven't been born again are referred to as being “without the Spirit.” The unredeemed part of a person is what we call the “old self”. The unsaved person doesn't have the capacity to fully appreciate or interpret the things of God.
That person's thought process is so spiritually upside-down compared to Divine wisdom, that God's point of view is considered to be foolishness. God's truths sound like foolishness to the unsaved person. At salvation, we receive the spirit of God. This change is so radical that the believer becomes increasingly like Christ and no longer conforms to the values and the behaviors of the world.
But being a believer can cause others to shy away from us. The Apostle Peter was familiar with believers being socially outcast due to being set apart for God. We can relate to that sometimes. Unbelievers consider our behavior strange and can't understand why we don't join them in their worldly ways. But God wants us to be this way. Peter said:
1 Peter 2:9-11 – “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, so that you may proclaim the praises of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
*******10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 11 Dear friends, I urge you as strangers and exiles to abstain from sinful desires that wage war against the soul.”
Spiritual discernment is a spiritual gift. As a Christian, we all have it to a certain extent. Some more so than others. When we become a child of God, we develop a new perspective of values, beliefs, and way of life. We become equipped with discernment that we never had before we met Christ. As we mature as believers, we are enabled to evaluate and look at things from God's point of view.
Through this discernment, we can help resolve arguments, we can cast down any cultic beliefs, we can squelch any rebellious thoughts, because we are equipped now with the knowledge of God. We are equipped with the truth. In other words, we can usually tell when someone is making up a story and telling a lie. That truth comes from knowing and reading the infallible and inerrant word of God.
I've heard people say that you don't have to believe the Bible to get to heaven. That is so untrue. Because it is the Bible, God's Holy Word, where we meet Jesus Christ. It is in the Bible that we get the instructions from Jesus Himself that He is the only way for us to get to heaven and that we must go through Him.
So once again we find that we are set apart through believing and knowing the word of God. And when we believe the word of God, we realize that we are set apart from the world. Set apart, but definitely never alone.
I offer you now the free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord. If you have never asked Him to be your Savior, you can do that right now. It is then that you will understand more fully God's Holy Word and what He wants you to do. You can accept Christ now as we pray.
