Knowing When: 1 Corinthians

Meditate on this often, and God will give you the right heart to know when to say something to others. The following passage is long, but sums it all up well. Take it one section at a time asking the Lord to reveal His message to you through His living Word. This has struck me deep enough that I will be meditating on it for the next few days, and will leave this post up as the most current. you take a few days as well, coming back to read it again and again.

1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16
For those who are perishing the message of the cross is foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is God's power. For it is written:

I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

and I will set aside the understanding

of the experts.

Where is the philosopher? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Hasn't God made the world's wisdom foolishness? For since, in God's wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of the message preached. 

For Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. Yet to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is God's power and God's wisdom, because God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

Brothers, consider your calling: not many are wise from a human perspective, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. Instead, God has chosen the world's foolish things to shame the wise, and God has chosen the world's weak things to shame the strong. God has chosen the world's insignificant and despised things - the things the world viewed as nothing - so that He might bring to nothing the things that are viewed as something, so that no one can boast in His presence.

But from Him you are in Christ Jesus, who for us became wisdom from God, as well as righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, in order that, as it is written: The one who boasts must boast in the Lord.

When I came to you, brothers, announcing the testimony of God to you, I did not come with brilliance of speech or wisdom. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, in fear, in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and power, so that your faith might not be based on men's wisdom, but on God's power.

However, among the mature we do speak a wisdom, but not a wisdom of this age, or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. On the contrary, we speak God's hidden wisdom in a mystery which God predestined before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age knew it, for if they had know it, they would have not crucified the Lord of glory.

But as it is written:

What no eye has seen

and no ear has heard,

and what has never come

into a man's heart,

is what God has prepared

for those who love Him.

Now God has revealed them to us by the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the concerns of a man except the spirit of the man that is in him? In the same way, no one knows the concerns of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, in order to know what has been freely given to us by God.

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.

But the natural man does not welcome what comes from God's Spirit, because it is foolishness to him; he is not able to know it since it is evaluated spiritually. The spiritual person, however, can evaluate everything, yet he himself cannot be evaluated by anyone. For:

who has known the Lord's mind,

that he may instruct Him?

But we have the mind of Christ.