The message of the cross is foolishness.
A call to worship.
Themes
The cross • Glory • Wisdom • Love • Justice • Power • Adam • The knowledge of good and evil • The knowledge of God • Death destroyed
The cross, in all its meekness and patience and compassion, was not some deed of passive, beautiful heroism. It instead was the most potent and aggressive deed heaven and earth have ever known: it was the attack of God’s holy love on the tyranny of evil, and on all our inhumanity, and all the piled-up insanity of our sin.
Scripture reading
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
This call to worship1 comes from a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to a struggling church that comprised both Jews and Greeks in the city of Corinth about 23 years after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.
Here’s what he wrote to his motley crew of friends:
The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are hellbent on destruction, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God — it is the way God works. In fact, elsewhere in Scripture it’s written: I’ll turn conventional wisdom on its head. I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. I’ll expose so-called experts as shams. So, where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, the world’s brilliant debaters? The wise, the educated, and the truly intelligent? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish. God has exposed it all as pretentious nonsense. God — in all his wisdom — saw to it that the world would not know Him through all its fancy wisdom. Instead, He took delight in using what the world considered stupid — preaching, of all things! — to bring those who trust Him into the way of salvation. While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we just proclaim Christ. Not just Christ, but Christ crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle — and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself, Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. This foolish plan of God is wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God’s weakness is stronger than the greatest of human strength. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses? God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And He chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. God has united you with Christ Jesus. For our benefit God made Him to be wisdom itself. Christ made us right with God; He made us pure and holy, and He freed us from sin.
Prayer
Father in heaven, we concede that the cross alone is our theology. If the one who was nailed to a brutal Roman cross is truly Immanuel — truly God Himself, with us! — then we probably really need to rethink everything about You. What kind of God are You, really, that You would bleed and die for us? This doesn’t seem at all like the kind of supreme being we’d imagine on our own. Rather, if You were something we imagined, You’d be more like us, just a little bigger and better. But the cross… Father… that’s a defibrillator to our thinking — it’s a massive countershock to our minds, because what happened on the cross was not a mere example of a little better humanity. No! It was the display of Your glory, and Your wisdom, and Your righteousness, and Your love, and Your justice, and Your power. And none of it looks to us like what it should. We would not have thought a man dying on a cross to be the definition of love. We would not have thought that the miscarriage of justice that led to such an event would be a display of Your perfect justice. We would not have dreamed that You, God Almighty, would make the cross the definitive display of Your power, nailed between two common criminals. Yet there You were crushing the head of the serpent. There You were tying up the strong man. There You were driving out the prince of this world. There You were triumphing over every spiritual power. There You were destroying death itself. There on the cross was true power, used as it should be: used to bless. The cross in all its meekness and patience and compassion was not some deed of passive beautiful heroism. It instead was the most potent and aggressive deed heaven and earth have ever known: it was the attack of Your holy love on the tyranny of evil, and on all our inhumanity, and all the piled-up insanity of our sin It all started when Adam sought the knowledge of good and evil from a tree, and then died. And so, then, from Your wisdom, Christ died on a tree and won for us a knowledge altogether more wonderful: the knowledge of You — the knowledge of who You truly are. Your cross did not only give to us Your sweet salvation, but also Your counterintuitive revelation. There at the cross, we see just how genuinely humble, how perfectly generous, how thoroughly self-giving, how brilliantly wise, how graciously kind, how mercifully saving, how deeply compassionate, how unconditionally loving, how perfectly just, how exceedingly worthy You truly are. And so now, whenever we spend time thinking of You, like here in this service of worship, here in Beverdam, Michigan, we can’t help but do so in the shadow of the cross. And whenever we spend time thinking about ourselves — with all our anthropology, psychology, sociology, our economics and business management, our social policy and political science — in the shadow of the cross we become unmasked and You are revealed. The light of Your cross takes away all the darkness that has invaded our minds and our thinking, that has invaded our hearts and all our emotions. All our petty pride, and ego, all our ugliness, it’s all exposed on the cross. Your use of power on the cross exposes all our abuse of power. Your kindness on the cross exposes all our messed-up selfishness. Your graciousness on the cross judges us. Your coming to save us in the way you did shows — indeed proves — just how deep our need really is. In the name of Jesus, who appears so incredibly foolish to the world, Amen
Inspiring resources
A call to worship creates wonderment, amazement, curiosity, yearning, captivation, provocation, hopefulness, thankfulness, affection, rapture, delight. As these mix together, the response is worship.
If this call to worship leaves you wondering or curious or provoked or hopeful, consider diving into this awesome book that inspired me.
1
This call to worship was given to the small assembly of Christians that gathered in Pathway Church, Beaverdam, Michigan, on Sunday, February 27, 2022.