For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.1 Cor 2:2
Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.Galatians 3:1
Paul said I preach Christ and Christ crucified.
Somebody wrote yesterday that he didn't get all this what he called New Age talk about I Am, and things like that...he just believed in the simplicity of Christ. All sorts of people liked this and probably I would like this in one way.
This is what came to me this morning while driving.....
Paul said he would build on no other foundation than the foundation laid, who is Christ. He wasn't in a hurry to build on another man's work.
I was reminded of people who try to help clear the homes of hoarders. Now hoarders are the actual problem...not the inanimate objects they hoard. But there is only usually one hoarder. In pre established churches you have loads of "hoarders" all interacting and all connected to all sorts of wrong spirits over years and years.
Every wrong doctrine or "wrong seeing" has a spirit attached. So if you look in the Spirit you have loads of hoarders of traditions of men, of wrong perceptions of an angry distant God, of works to appease this God, of reluctance to be really really real with men and with God.....you can understand Paul.
The Holy Spirit drew my attention to the two phrases...I preach Christ and Christ crucified. People who talk of the simplicity of Christ usually mean they preach the forgiveness of Christ through His Blood. In their heads they are thinking or presuming, as I was, that this also covered the phrase Christ crucified. But no. Paul is being specific. He means the whole raft of his teaching that is summed up in Galatians 2:20, and Romans 6 to 8, and was initially quite particular to him and the spirit the other Apostles had come into....and that is what they all referred to as laying a foundation of Christ.
I am not sure that the one who was extolling the simplicity of Christ wasn't wanting the second message particularly...the FULL EXTENT OF THE CHRIST CRUCIFIED MESSAGE.
Some things just catch your eye. Specifically a nudge inside telling me to have a look to see if the CW had posted anything...then to find that not only that he had but that I'd been reading the same passage in 1Cor this morning. Just about everything gets turned on its head and upside down for us. Paul really 'gets it'. We struggle perhaps because whole series of NT words are so familiar to us that we end up fusing together 'gospel' (good news) with 'Christ crucified' without flinching as if these two fit together like strawberries and cream. It is of course i.e.the cross is good news, but we become so detached from the awful drawn out hours that Mary had to endure watching as the life drained from her son held to the cross by the nails. We forget that the one we love was there enduring it all bleeding and hurting. How can 'good news' or gospel ever end up in the same sentence as the crucifixion of Christ and yet it is. How can the weakness of God be the strength we have or the foolishness of God our wisdom and yet all these things are not only true but to be fleshed out in us as we live as Christ in this world. There is no escape from the purposes of God. There is no looking back once one's hand is on the plough. Our faith is in the one who has his hand on the plough. He doesn't look back. And all this is being laid in us as foundational. We might think that means lifeless inert foundation stones; solid foundation, doctrine maybe. It is not. But each stone is a living stone. The foundation stone is alive, it is Christ himself in all his risen glory living in the world through us whatever we're doing: shopping, watching cricket, reading, at work, fixing a piano(!),sharing our faith, being persecuted, being weak, ostracised, few of us were noble...I love v 23-28. I want to say to Paul 'I'm beginning to get it Paul, really get it!' Quite rightly we fight to avoid suffering. Christ cried out 'let this cup pass from me'. But all of us are drawn on by the love of God to expel from deep inside the word that he used next 'nevertheless'.
ReplyDeleteHoarding truths I like that one. We hoard the grave clothes that were left behind when the freedom of a new man rolled away the roman sealed tomb of the mind and fled to a new day of completion.
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