message very timely for us in this state and in our culture. A strong message. In fact, my brother-in-law who's visiting here this weekend from Kansas and who's going on the tour with us to Israel this week said to me after the service last night, I didn't expect to hear a message like that in the California church. You know, we sort of have a reputation back there in the heartland. One we've worked hard to gain, by the way. But we as a church have a very important role in our society.
That's what he's talking about today. But in this service we're going to be looking again in 1 Corinthians chapter 2 and I invite you to open your Bible there please. I'm going to talk about what God has given you. In verse 12 of chapter 2, Paul references the things freely given you by God. So we're going to look at this text through that lens this morning of what God has given you. If you could ask God for anything, anything, what would it be? The Cadillac? Well, all right.
You can have the Cadillac. Somebody else may want healing from a disease. Somebody else may want to be with their grandkids more often. Amen to that, right? Jesus was walking through the city of Jericho 2,000 years ago and there was a man causing a ruckus off to the side. His disciples tried to hush this man down but he raised even more of an outcry. Jesus said, let him come here. So they brought the man to Jesus and Jesus said, what do you want me to give you?
And Blind Bartimaeus said, Lord, that I may what? That I may see, that I may receive my sight. God gave it to him. A thousand years before that, God appeared to a king in a dream and he said, what do you want from me? I'll give you whatever you ask for. And Solomon said, Lord, that I may have wisdom and knowledge to lead your great people. And God so generously answered Solomon's request that Solomon is the wisest and the smartest man who has ever lived in the history of the world.
If you could ask God for anything, what would you ask God for? God is not a stingy giver. God is a generous God. And God has freely given us a gift, one that sets us apart from all of the rest of humanity. Those of us who are followers of Jesus have received a gift from God that sets us apart. Now it's not that we're something special except we are to God out of His grace. It's not that we're exclusive. Anyone could have this gift that would receive it.
The unfortunate thing is that there are those who reject it and therefore they don't have it. What is this gift that God has given to us? Well, I want to talk about that in the first part of our text. What God's gift is? I would put it this way. It's what God is doing in history. Or to say it for your notes, it is special insight into God's eternal plan. That is a gift that God has given to us. It is wisdom to see what He is about in the history of the world.
You see, God has a plan and God is working His plan. And God, as a gift to you and me who are the followers of Jesus, has given to us an understanding of His plan. To sum up Paul's words about God's plan or God's wisdom, he uses two words, Christ, what's the other one? Crucified. Christ, crucified. Now please don't think that's simplistic. Christ crucified is like that little file on my computer.
If I want to know what's on my computer, I go, if I have the Windows operating system, I go to start, click that, and then up comes a screen and I go to my computer. Have you ever done that before? That's where you want to keep your fingers away from the delete keys, right? My computer. You click on that and it opens up another screen that tells you everything that's on your computer. Now you don't see it all there, but it's all in the files that are down below there, right?
That's how Windows works. So when Paul says God's wisdom is Christ crucified, he's saying that's like my computer and down attached to that, down below that are all of the other things of God. All that God is doing in the world comes out of the truth of the sacrifice of His Son for us. Christ crucified secures the plan of God. Let's look at the verse. We're looking at verse 6. He says, we do, however, speak a message of wisdom.
Now Paul has just been saying, we did not come to you with the wisdom of man using wise words and profound speech. He said, we came to you very simply. However he says, we do speak to you a kind of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, God's mysterious wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.
None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Some things about God's plan we see here in these verses. First of all, God's plan that He's working, God's plan is entirely distinct from any of man's efforts. God's doing it. It's not the result of what man is going to do. It's not like the vain plans that the rulers of this age have attempted.
Dictators, presidents, kings, governments, secret societies, they've all imagined their own kind of utopia. Empires, commonwealths, societies and kingdoms which they have imagined and dreamed up and tried to fulfill can never make humanity better or safer or more prosperous. In fact, Paul says here that the age and the rulers of it are all coming to nothing. All of their efforts really are futile.
They are empty with all of the talk, all of the promises, all of the investments, the schemes, the treaties, the discoveries, the inventions, the breakthroughs, the organizations that man has created. We have to conclude that God is right, that all of them are useless to restore man from his sinful and ruined condition. Until less than 100 years ago, the world was thinking about the League of Nations. You ever heard of that? Yeah, it was man's attempt to say we're going to stop wars.
We're going to all come together and there won't be another great war like we've just been through. Well, the League of Nations was flushed a long time ago and more wars came. And then after World War II, we created the United Nations. We said this finally is going to be our way to reach utopia. We're all just going to come together here in this beautiful city of New York and we're going to hash out our problems at the table. There is nothing more impotent in the world than the United Nations.
Nothing more useless that has accomplished little than the United Nations. A few years ago, the Iron Curtain fell and we all rejoiced and we do rejoice that it did. And we said the Cold War is over. But at that time, statements were made like, we're now going to enjoy a peace dividend. You remember that?
We're now going to be able to use all the money that was going to go to military armaments and to wars and we're going to be able to turn that toward humanity and we're going to have ability to end poverty and end all the injustice in the world. And we had a President Bush at that time who said, we're going to have a new world order. Well, the last 15 years have proved him to be quite wrong.
You see, mankind has all of these dreams and imaginations and desires for utopia, but man is incapable of bringing that about. Why? Because man cannot change the nature of man. And this year, this election year, we're hearing lots more empty promises. We're going to do that. We're going to do that. And this, well, as somebody said, there's a Greek word for all of that. It's the word baloney. It just ain't going to happen. Why?
Because the rulers of this age and with all of their wisdom, they come to nothing. God's wisdom is so distinct from that. It brings me to point number two, which is that God's plan will actually achieve the highest purpose. It will actually achieve what God has said.
And by the way, that highest purpose of God includes a place for restored humanity, a restored human race, that is, a redeemed people, a remnant of our race who trust Christ and are therefore transformed by that message of Christ crucified. And God's intent and God's purpose is that that redeemed humanity will one day share the glory of Jesus Christ and regain dominion over the earth and over all of God's creation, which we lost in the fall of Adam and Eve and the disobedience from God.
God is going to restore humanity to that exalted position. It is through the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ that God will one day rectify all things and establish a new world order to be sure with a new and redeemed humanity. Peter points to this when in his sermon in Acts chapter three, he says, repent then talking to the Jews and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out and that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, times of refreshing.
He goes on to explain that he says, Jesus must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore all things. That's what Peter is thinking about that distant time, even from our day, when God is going to restore all things and achieve the highest purpose. Paul puts it this way in Ephesians chapter one. He says, God has now revealed to us his mysterious plan regarding Christ, a plan to fulfill his own good pleasure. And this is the plan at the right time.
That is when the times come to their culmination at the right time, God will bring together everything under the authority of Christ, everything in heaven and on earth. Friends, that is the highest purpose of God. If you want to know what God is about in our world today, God has told you. It is that one day he is going to bring everything back to the point where it is under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the God-man.
And just as the first Adam lost it all because of his disobedience to God, Jesus Christ through his obedience, his crucifixion, his sacrifice for us, his resurrection, he as the last Adam is going to reign and we with him. God is working his plan and his plan will achieve the highest purpose. Point number three, God's plan was completely missed by human leaders and their wisdom. You see, they rejected the Son when he came. He was not what they expected or what they wanted him to be.
Man did not understand because of the hardness of man's heart. But the interesting thing is that man's rejection, which resulted in the crucifixion of Christ, was the very means by which God showed his wisdom. You see, man played right into the sovereign purpose of God by his rejection of Christ. It is through the rejection of mankind that the Lord of glory was crucified and by that he accomplished the redemption of mankind. An amazing story that God has given us insight into.
But the world misses it. God's plan was completely missed. Number four, God's plan was destined before the creation for our glory. In other words, the glory of the redeemed out of the human race. We all are familiar with that statement that begins the purpose driven life. It's not about you and that is so true. It's not about us. But let me tell you something that ought to blow our minds. It's not about us, but it is all for us in Christ. That's why God is at work in history.
That's why God sent his son to be the sacrifice. That's why he raised him from the dead. That's why he is someday going to send him back from heaven at the culmination of times to bring everything under the administration of Christ. And we who are Christ will belong to that and share his glory. It's astonishing and mind blowing that God has done this as Paul says for our glory. You see in exalting his own glory, God has chosen to make you and me vessels of it.
Paul agrees with this and he explains God's plan this way in Romans chapter nine. He said God did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy whom he prepared in advance for glory, even us. Paul is saying we are the vessels, we're the containers of God's glory. And in the ages to come, God is going to display his glory and his wisdom to all of the angelic world and all of creation through us, his redeemed. That is the plan of God. You, you are God's royalty.
You are God's princes and God's princesses in waiting. You are his children whom he will one day make glorious with Christ and he will display to all of the creation the brilliance of his glory through you. That is God's purpose. And Paul says this was not known, but it's now known. You see the Corinthians would have been resonating with the language Paul is using here because many of them in their pagan religions follow the mysterious, the mystery cults.
It was a kind of a secret society very similar to the Masonic Lodge or to the Mormons or to other societies that are secret. See for example where you have a religious cult that has secrets just for those who are initiated only those on the inside know and you've got to join and work your way to the inner circle in order to learn all of the secrets, a mystery cult. What Paul is saying here, he's using some of that same language and he's saying yes, God has had a mystery too.
He's had secrets, but now God has disclosed them to us and now we're going to learn in the second part of our text how God's gift came to us, how this knowledge came to us, how God revealed the secret to us. We pick it up in verse nine. He says it is written, no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him. Now when do you most often hear those verses at a funeral?
I used them at a funeral just a week and a half ago and they express a wonderful truth and that is we haven't seen heaven yet and what it's like. Our ears, our eyes haven't seen it. We can't imagine with our minds what heaven is like, but that's not what this verse really is saying.
It's an application of the verse, but it's not the interpretation because notice he says, eye hasn't seen, ear hasn't heard, we haven't entered into our hearts the things that God's prepared, but he says God has revealed it to us by His Spirit. He goes on to say, the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except man's spirit within him? In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
We have not received the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. So in these verses, we want to talk about how God has disclosed this to us, how He's given this gift to us, and to sum it up, it's in this phrase, by divine revelation, by divine revelation.
Several things I want to say about this. First of all, natural means of human discovery could never uncover what God's plan is. That's what Paul means by verse 9. Then by his eye, by his ear, by his rationale, by his ability to think and discover and imagine, could never understand the secret things of God. Never. We're incapable of uncovering what God's plan is. It cannot be seen, it cannot be reasoned, it has to be received some other way.
Secondly, God has, God must rather, and has taken the initiative to disclose Himself and His plan to us. To us, that Paul described in chapter 1 as the nobodies of the world. Isn't this something? Not to the elite, not to the somebodies, but to us that the world counts as nobodies, God has revealed the secrets. This revelation was revealed to the apostles and to the other writers of Scripture, and you and I hold it in our hands today. This is what Paul is talking about, the secret things of God.
God has revealed them to us in his Word. How did God do this? You know, Paul says it was through his Spirit. The Holy Spirit was the agent through whom the secrets came to us. Now why was it the Holy Spirit? Paul gives an illustration in verse 11. He says, nobody knows what a man is thinking except the Spirit within him. As I look out at many of you this morning, you look like you're listening to me. But I know better.
I know that there are some of you who have your eyes focused up here, but your minds are somewhere else. I know that just intuitively, but I don't know what you're thinking about because my thoughts and your thoughts are known only to us. And Paul says by way of application, that's true about God too. We're created in God's image. This is true about God. God's thoughts no one else can know except his Spirit.
And he says, God's Spirit plums the very depths of God into the very deepest thoughts and the character and the desires and the plans of God. God's Spirit knows the thoughts of God and is the Holy Spirit who now reveals to us the thoughts of God.
And the writers of Scripture, Paul seems to have in mind in this phrase that it is the Spirit, the Holy Spirit who gives the thoughts and then the words to write the thoughts, spiritual words in spiritual thoughts so that as Paul and the other writers of Scripture were doing their work, they were recording for you and for me and for every generation the very thoughts of God in this book. This book friends is a precious gift from God to us.
We must never take it for granted because this book is the great gift that God has given us by the Holy Spirit. It's the third thing I want to say, who is it that benefits from this insight that God gives to his plan? Paul gives us the answer in verses 14 through 16 where we pick up the reading. It says, the man without the Spirit or literally it says the natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God.
Their foolishness to him, he cannot understand them because they're spiritually discerned. But he says the spiritual man makes judgments about all things and he himself is not subject to any man's judgment. For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we, Christ followers, we have the mind of Christ. Paul in this text contrasts two kinds of people. There's the natural man and there's the spiritual man. So let's talk about them.
Who is the natural man that Paul is talking about? The NIV translates it, the man without the Spirit, but it's really the sukkakos man, the soulish man. As human beings we are material and immaterial. And that immaterial part of us is soul and spirit. Our soul is that part of us that relates to our world. By it we see, we hear, we learn, we think, we feel, we make decisions. Everybody who's born has a soul and everybody who's born has a spirit.
But the spirit of the natural man is dead in trespasses and sins. You see the spirit of man is that part of him that relates to God. But because of sin that we're born with, the natural man is not alive toward God and so that spirit in him is dead. He is without the Holy Spirit living within him. Now Paul is not putting down the natural man. So the term that Paul uses here is really man at his best, his unregenerate best.
It is man who is cultured, who is civilized, who is educated, who is moral, who is sophisticated, but he's natural because he has no life of God within him. Now Paul uses some phrases here and gives us three descriptives of this natural man. Number one, he has a prejudiced attitude. He does not accept. He does not welcome the things of the spirit of God. He can read the Bible. He can study the Bible.
He can appreciate the Bible as great literature or as history or as a resource for his study of archaeology. But the natural man does not understand the things of God in this book. That's because he has poor judgment. The reason that he cannot accept the things of the spirit of God is because he considers those things to be foolish. He considers the Bible as being reasonably accurate history perhaps, as giving to us beautiful poetry. But he does not accept the Bible as God's word.
He considers that idea to be foolish. He does not agree with what the Bible says about man. He does not agree about what the Bible says about where man came from and why we're in the condition we are and how we can escape that condition. Man says that's foolish. And that's because he has a powerless comprehension. In other words, he cannot understand. He cannot understand because these things are spiritually discerned and he is spiritually dead. And we were all born in this condition.
But when we come to Jesus Christ in faith and we're born again, we become a different kind of man, no longer a natural man. We become what Paul calls here the spiritual man. Notice that phrase in verse 15. That is, we are now alive toward God. We have been resurrected with Christ. We have been given the Holy Spirit. And so there is this connection with God now in those of us who are spiritual. But Paul has something more in mind than just that.
He's thinking about the fact that we are born again into God's family and then as a result of that, we grow to maturity. We grow up in spiritual things, in our understanding of the things of God. It's the same as the word mature back in verse 6. Now I point this out because you see these Corinthians that he's writing to had been born again and they were spiritual in that sense. They were no longer just natural.
But Paul goes on to say in the next few verses, but your babies, you've never grown up. And he says, I could not speak to you as mature people. And he says, you are missing the deeper things of God because these things are for those who are spiritual in the sense that they're born again and they're growing spiritually. And he says basically to the Corinthians, you think and you act like you're unsafe people because you are not growing in your faith.
And so he goes on to tell them what they need to do. So who is the spiritual man? Well, the spiritual man is the one who is alive to God. And Paul again describes the spiritual man. There are three phrases that describe the spiritual man. First of all, the spiritual man discerns spiritual things. It is he can look at the world around him and he understands what's going on because he has the word of God in his mind and his heart and he's growing in the word.
And as a result of this, he looks at himself. He looks at other people. He looks at the situations of his life. He looks at the world history and he says, I get it now. This is what's happening. Do you understand this? Is it coming across? The spiritual man discerns spiritual things because he's indwelt by the Holy Spirit. He's growing in the things of God. The spirit of God is taking the word and instructing his mind. He's growing deeper into the things of God.
Secondly about the spiritual man is this. He baffles the natural man. The natural man looks at him and says, I don't understand you. You're an enigma to me. Hey friends, that's the world around us. They do not understand you and me. They don't understand our values. They don't understand where we get them. Not only do they not agree with them, they don't even understand why we would go to the Bible. It's foolishness. The natural man looks at you and me and says, I cannot figure you out.
You confuse me. That shouldn't surprise us. John MacArthur writes, they try to appraise believers of course, but they are always wrong. They may accurately evaluate our faults, our shortcomings, our living that is inconsistent with our faith, but they cannot accurately evaluate our faith. They don't get it. Why? Because they can't understand the things of the spirit of God. The third descriptive of the spiritual man is this. He has the mind of Christ.
Paul says no one can advise God, but the fact is that God has given you and me His thoughts in this book. We have the mind of Christ. We are able to look at the world through the lens of Jesus Christ. Unbelievers do not understand what makes us tick, but we can look at them and we can look at our world around us and we say, I get it. I understand what's happening in the world because God gives us His thoughts. That is the gift that God has given us.
We should never take it for granted or undervalue it. Rather we should embrace it and say, oh God, thank you that you have revealed to me as one of your followers an understanding of what you're about in the world today. Now there are some personal questions I want us to think about before we wrap this up. The first one is a very honest question that we have to face and that is the question that we should ask ourselves. Am I still a natural person, a natural man? Or have I been born again?
You see it's possible to be a very good person, to be a cultured person, an educated person. It's possible to have your life together in a human sense, to be respected in your community and still be a natural man without a relationship to God. Your spirit is dead within you. You know you can fix that this morning.
By trusting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you can be born again and God will put within you His Spirit and resurrect that dead spirit in you and give you a living relationship with Himself. You can fix it today. I hope you will. Now in a setting like this most of us have probably already done that and so we need to ask ourselves a second question. Am I spiritual or mature to use Paul's word here? Am I growing in my relationship to God?
Am I focused in my life on the things of God, the things that God has revealed in His word for me? Am I sowing the word of God into my mind and thus reaping a harvest of change in my life and change in attitude, in my behavior, in my choices, in my relationships? As you see what this is about is that God brings our lives into alignment with His word as we are growing in it. And the result of that is our lives become full and abundant and more meaningful.
And the disappointments and the trials and the pains of our lives which we all have are understood because we have the mind of Christ and we see where this alignment is taking us in the future, what God's purpose is. I need to be growing in the word and so do you. The only way to grow in the word is to spend time in it and that brings me to my third question and that is what am I doing with the gift that God has given me? Here I have the most precious gift imaginable.
I have in this book the inspired thoughts of God written down in human words for me to learn and to grow by. What am I doing with this book in my life? Am I spending time in it? Am I listening to God allowing Him to give me deeper insights into His thoughts for me to by the Holy Spirit change my life? All of us can grow there can't we? We can spend more time in it. One of the exciting things about going to Israel, somebody said to me last night, well pastor have a good time on your vacation.
And I thought well thank you very much. I said that in fact I didn't say what I thought. My thought was if I am going on vacation I wouldn't be going with 40 people from the church. Not that I don't love you all but that's not vacation. The reason we are doing this trip is so that we can grow in the things of God.
You see by doing something like this you gain insights into the word that you can really only have by being there and seeing and learning changes your life, your whole perspective on the word. Are you growing in the word? The final question is this. It's the question am I living my life with a view to the glory ahead? Here I am one of God's princes. One of God's princes. Am I living my life in this world with a view to what God has prepared for me?
You see God has told me what His purpose is and that purpose is that one day I'm going to be filled with the glory of Christ in every part of my being including my resurrected body. And I'm going to reign with Christ and when He is placed over everything He's going to be the top dog on the organizational chart. His box is going to be at the very top of it.
I'm going to be reigning with Christ over that new creation and God is going to use me and you as object lessons of His grace and His glory for all of the rest of the angelic creation of whatever else is out there to see. God says to them you want to know what I'm like look over here at this child of mine. Am I living my life now in light of what God has prepared? Because you see when I do it changes perspective.
The hard things I go through the trials, the disappointments, even the successes I look at through that lens and I have understanding. I say oh God thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for the hurt. Thank you for the anxiety. Thank you for the pain that I'm going through because I know what's ahead. Isn't it great to know where history is going? What peace that brings to your heart about our world that we live in today?
What peace that should bring to your heart regarding God's plan in your own life. If God has planned all of this out for the future don't you think you can take care of your little life? Of course you can. God has given us a marvelous gift. He wants us to enjoy it and to grow in it. May we do that. Father my prayer for myself and for my brothers and sisters here is that we may indeed grow to maturity.
That you will in your wonderful patience continue to draw us along on this journey that we've begun so that we will deepen our understanding of the things of God. We do not want to be longtime infants, babies in the faith. We don't want to be superficial. We don't want to be carnal in our attitudes. God we want to be spiritual. So help us to grasp that and to live for what's to come. The glory that you have prepared for all those who love and trust Jesus, the Christ crucified. This is my prayer.
Jesus sing with me that.