1 Corinthians 1 | The Foolishness of God
The Foolishness of God: Why the Gospel Defies Every Expectation
In 1920, humans broadcast the world's first commercial radio signal. Those waves left Earth traveling at 186,000 miles per second and have been moving through space ever since. In 105 years, they have crossed several solar systems. And yet our closest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away. Those original signals have covered just 0.04% of the distance to get there.
The universe is an immense place. And First Corinthians is a letter from nearly 2,000 years ago, written in a foreign language, to a foreign culture, dealing with issues most of us know very little about. At Redemption Gilbert we are working through this letter one chapter at a time, and right away Paul says something that lands like it was written yesterday.
The Church Was Divided Then Too
Paul has barely finished his greeting before he gets to the point. He has heard from Chloe's household that there are quarrels in the church. Some people say they follow Paul. Others follow Apollos, the eloquent Greek philosopher who came after Paul and preached with remarkable skill. Others claim Peter, one of the original apostles. Some say they follow Christ alone, as if that makes them the purists.
To understand why this matters you have to understand how Corinthian culture worked. The city ran on a patron system. When you arrived in town you picked a powerful person to align yourself with, someone who would provide for you, and in return you publicly supported them, promoted them, and defended them against their rivals. Your loyalty to your patron was your identity.
Paul is watching the church do the exact same thing. They have taken the teachers of the gospel and turned them into patrons, building factions and dividing the community along the lines of whose teaching they prefer. Paul's response is sharp. Was Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in his name?
Division Is Not Just a Preference Problem
It would be easy to read this and think Paul is simply asking people to be nicer about their disagreements. He is saying something much more serious. When we take our preferences and make them law, we are committing a sin of pride. We have convinced ourselves that God in his wisdom just happened to make truth line up perfectly with what we already believe. And when we divide from brothers and sisters over those preferences, Paul calls it something uncomfortable: antichrist living.
God came to unite. When the church divides over preferences, style, personalities, or secondary issues, it works against the very thing God came to do. That is a strong word and Paul means it that way.
This is not abstract. There are dozens of faithful Christian congregations within five miles of most of us, all divided from each other. Paul saw this coming and he is not impressed.
The Bet That Looks Like Foolishness
Paul pivots to something that cuts even deeper. The Jews wanted miracles to validate their faith. The Greeks wanted intellectual wisdom that made sense to them. And Paul says: we have neither of those to offer you. What we have is Christ crucified.
A crucified savior. Humiliated, rejected, killed in the most shameful way imaginable. That is the Christian bet.
And here is the thing. No one would have invented that story. No one sitting in heaven trying to design a plan to save the world would have come up with it. Born to an unwed teenage girl in a small town, raised in obscurity, spending his ministry among farmers and lepers and outcasts, rejected by the very people who had been waiting for him their whole lives, and then killed by the empire he came to redeem. That is not a plan any human would have written.
God chose it on purpose. Because if he had done it the smart way, the strong way, the impressive way, someone would stand up and say that is exactly what they would have done. No one can say that about the cross. And it is in that foolishness that the power of God to save is revealed.
Remember Who You Were
Paul closes the chapter with an invitation and a gut check. Think about who you were before you were called. Were you wise? Were you influential? Were you of noble birth? Did you have something to stand on?
Or did he find you lost, hard-hearted, blind, plugging your ears?
God chose the foolish things to shame the wise. He chose the weak things to shame the strong. He chose the lowly, the despised, the things that are not, to nullify the things that are. So that no one could boast before him. If you have been saved, if grace has found you, if your heart has softened and your eyes have opened, it is not because you figured something out. It is not because you were strong or smart or ready. It is because God had grace for you. That is the only reason any of us are here.
What are you boasting about?
A Personal Reflection
Division is easy to spot from the outside. It is much harder to see in ourselves. Most of us have a version of it — a preference quietly made into a requirement, a conviction that the people who do church differently are missing something important.
Paul says that instinct, left unchecked, is pride. And pride dressed in theological language is still pride.
Questions to sit with:
Where have you made your preferences law?
Is there a person or a group you have written off over something that is not actually central to the gospel?
Spiritual practice: This week, intentionally pray for a Christian community or tradition that is different from yours. Not to agree with everything they do, but to practice holding your preferences loosely before God.
Go Deeper
Paul packs a lot into this first chapter and the sermon goes much deeper. You can watch the full sermon in the Redemption Gilbert Sermon Library or on YouTube.
If this sermon stirred something in you, one of the best next steps is getting connected to a Community Group at Redemption Gilbert. These are small groups of people working through the same questions together, in someone's home, around a table. That is actually closer to what the Corinthian church looked like than anything else we do.
And if you are newer to Redemption Gilbert and want to find your footing, our Next Steps team would love to help you figure out where to plug in, whether that is a Community Group, serving on a Sunday morning, or just finding out more about who we are.