1 Corinthians 1:9-29

⁹God, who got you started in this spiritual adventure, shares with us the life of his Son and our Master Jesus. He will never give up on you. Never forget that.f

¹⁰I have a serious concern to bring up with you, my friends, using the authority of Jesus, our Master. I''ll put it as urgently as I can: You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common.g

¹¹I bring this up because some from Chloe''s family brought a most disturbing report to my attention--that you''re fighting among yourselves!

¹²I''ll tell you exactly what I was told: You''re all picking sides, going around saying, "I''m on Paul''s side," or "I''m for Apollos," or "Peter is my man," or "I''m in the Messiah group."

¹³I ask you, "Has the Messiah been chopped up in little pieces so we can each have a relic all our own? Was Paul crucified for you? Was a single one of you baptized in Paul''s name?"h

¹⁴I was not involved with any of your baptisms--except for Crispus and Gaius--and on getting this report, I''m sure glad I wasn''t.

¹⁵At least no one can go around saying he was baptized in my name.

¹⁶(Come to think of it, I also baptized Stephanas''s family, but as far as I can recall, that''s it.)

¹⁷God didn''t send me out to collect a following for myself, but to preach the Message of what he has done, collecting a following for him. And he didn''t send me to do it with a lot of fancy rhetoric of my own, lest the powerful action at the center--Christ on the Cross--be trivialized into mere words.i

¹⁸The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hellbent on destruction, but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense. This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out.j

¹⁹It''s written, I''ll turn conventional wisdom on its head, I''ll expose so-called experts as crackpots.k

²⁰So where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn''t God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense?l

²¹Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb--preaching, of all things!-to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation.m

²²While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom,

²³we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle--and Greeks pass it off as absurd.n

²⁴But to us who are personally called by God himself--both Jews and Greeks--Christ is God''s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one.o

²⁵Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can''t begin to compete with God''s "weakness."p

²⁶Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don''t see many of "the brightest and the best" among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families.q

²⁷Isn''t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses,r

²⁸chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"?s

²⁹That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God.