The Cross is Powerful Folly - 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Well, good morning, church. How many of you have spent time struggled, wrestled with finding just the perfect gift for your kid, and Northland we just blessed with. babies and new kids all the time. I remember my daughters, they're older now, but when they were younger, it's like, I want to get just the perfect kind of stuffed animal for them. I don't want a generic one that all these other kids had. I don't want one that, you know, you just see, pull off the shelf somewhere. And so we found this awesome store. You've probably been there called Builde Bear. You can get timeless t teddy right there, and he just comes kind of plain, you can get any type of stuffed animal you want, and then you get to accessorize that animal anywhere you want. How many of you have built a bear or some other animal? Look at this that, all these people. You go in there and go, "I want exactly what I want. I'm wise enough to know the best build a bear for my kid. So they get this clothing, they get this little thing stuck inside of them with this message. So when when they squeeze it, they get just a message I want them to get. So we get to build our own stuffed animal for our kid. That's an amazing thing, because I know what's best for my kid. I I want my kid to have to have. Imagine, though, if we had to build a God workshop where we get to build our own God. We get to use our wisdom and go, I'll build the God that I want. Like, if I got to go into the build a God workshop, I would have a God that is extremely strict and judgmental and has rules for you people. not for me. 'cause I want a God that I like, I like rules, I like people to follow rules, I like everything in order, but I need a whole lot of leniency for me. So I'd have a God that had a lot of rules. Each of of you would create your own God, right? You would go in and say, "I need this little thing here, I need this idea from here." If we pulled all the philosophies of the world and said, "Hey, start building your own God." In fact, we have a build a God workshop. It's just called the world, where the world and its wisdom builds the God that it thinks is correct. I imagine, if you're like me at all, you've also spent time in the build a God workshop. Building a God that you thought was the right one for you, that was like,This God suits me, that I' I'm wise enough to know what he should be like And so I create a God in my own image. And yet, when we come to 1 Corinthians, we're going to see Paul tell us that God, the true God's wisdom, makes all of our worldly wisdom foolish, and that the idea of a build a God workshop simply won't make sense because God God's already there, and in fact, he's the one who should be building us, should be shaping us into the way He wants us to be. If you have your Bibles turned to 1 Corinthians, it's a book in the New Test Testament. If you have one of the house Bibles that's under the seat in front of you, it's on page 952. in the third week of a series through 1 Corinthians called Undivided. Paul was right into his a church in Corinth that had a lot of new believers. He had shared the gospel there recently, he had left, he was writing back to them, a lot of new believers with a lot of confusion about beliefs and what it means to follow Christ. And so he's writing to them to help them understand how to live faithfully, and how to deal with the divisions that had cropped up in their church. And so we've titled the seriesUndivided, as he begins to lean into this, he's already told them that, like, God's called you, that you're his followers, and yet you shouldn't be dividing over personalities or different styles that all of us who are followers of Christ are in Christ. He's the one that unites us. And so these divisions they were experiencing weren't acceptable. He says in verse 17 of 1 Corinthians, this was last week's sermon. He says, "For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel. And not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. And then he's going to expand, and we're going to expand for the next three weeks on this phrase where Paul said, "I didn't come to you with words of eloquent wisdom, but simply with the message of the cross What Paul means by that in 1 centuryury, Roman, Greek culture, is people were highly prized for their ability to speak. They didn't have TV. They didn't have Netflix. So if they wanted to be entertained at a party, they didn't just turn on the TV and watch the football game, someone would eventually stand up and speak and talk and give wisdom, and people who could do that really well were prized. The content, maybe didn't matter so much, but you see a ability to be eloquent. And Paul says, "I didn't show up like that. I just came and told you the message of the cross. He's going to talk today about how the message itself is foolishness. Next week, we're going to see where he says, "If you don't think that that's enough, God chose a bunch of foolish people to believe in Him, so look around. as he tells the Corinthians, and check yourself out." And then he said, finallyally, and then he chose a foolish man to tell you about that, and Paul looks at himself, and who he is, and how God is turning the world world's wisdom on its head. If you have your Bibles, let's read the passage real quick, and then I'm going to come back and unpack these verses verses 18 to 25. It says, for the Word of the cross, it's folly to those who are perishing, butut to us who are being saved, it is the power of God, for it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of theerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom. It please God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God, for the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.. Look with me back in verse 18, and we see Paul say that the cross is powerful folly. Now, Paul knows how to turn a phrase, and throughout this passage, he's going to be taking this idea of Greek and Roman wisdom and turning it on its head, as he talks about God's folly and God's wisdom, and their wisdom and their folly. But he starts this way, "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. Well, what is the word of the cross? This is a message that Paul brought to the Corinthians. In very short order, it's this, that God God himself became human to redeem humans from their sin He died on a Roman cross, convicted as a blasphemer, he died, was put in a grave, and three days later, he came out of the grave defeating sin in death, and now he is offering that salvation to the entire world, not just the Jewish nation that he had come to save, but the whole world.C His message was this, A man died on a cross and came back from the dead to save us. And he says, "The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. Paul broke the world here into two groups. Now, this was normal in the first century. Paul would talk about, there's Jews, and there's Gentiles. There's a Jewish nation that Paul was in, and then everyone who wasn't Jewish was a Gentile. The Romans and Greeks would have spoken of kind of, there's the Greeks, and then noticed that everyone else is barbarians. They said, "We're the Greeks, and you're the barbarians, and barbarians just people who had a different language. Paul here, though, divides the world of the two groups, those who are being saved, and those who are perishing. And he says, those who are being saved are in the process of that. Now, in the New Testament, being saved, being rescued from death in our own sin is something that happens at a point in our life where we believe it in Christ, so if you're here and you've accepted Christ, you have been saved. It's something that's happening to us right now, as believers is that we are being saved. We're being transformed into the way God wants us to live. And then there's coming a time in the future when Christ puts down all the enemies, death being the last one, and we will be saved. We'll be giving an immortal body. And then he says, there are those who are perishing. Paul had been on the road of those who were perishing before he met Jesus, and then he moved over into the group of those who were being saved What moved him from one to the other? He's going to say, is Jesus and the message of Christ and what Jesus did on the cross. We have a hard time, though. At least I do. Here in 21st century United States, I grew up in the church. And when I hear the phrase that the gospel, the good news of Jesus, is folly it just, it hits flat from me, to be honest. I grew up in the church. I've heard of Jesus my whole life. The idea of Jesus being this wise guy, this smart man, that the cross being a good thing, that we have a cross on our church out here, we have crosses all around, it just doesn't sound like folly to me as I grew up. I was never in an atmosphere where that would be seen that way. I don't think in 21st century, we can experience how ridiculous and how foolish and and completely out of the norm, the cross would have been perceived by people. Cicero, who was a 1st century B.C. philosopher in the Roman Empire. wrote this about crucifixion. He says, "To bind a Roman citizen is a crime. To flog him is an abomination, to slay him is almost an act of murder. But to crucify him. What? There is no fitting word that can be possibly described so horrible a deed. Crucifixion in the 1st century was the lowest form of execution the Romans had. It was reserved for the lowest in society and for people who had been conquered by the Romans. Cicero says, "For a Roman citizen to even think about having this happen to them. There's no word, we can't even describe how bad that is. how ridiculous this is, how horrible it is, that at that time, crucifixion was the most shameful, the most humiliating way to die. We We have such a hard time seeing that because we have 2,000 years of history built in of how Christ has been been changing the world through what he did, that we have a hard time seeing it. Here's an example, though. It's called the Alexa Minas graffiti. It was the earliest graffiti that we know. It's the earliest representation by the way, that we have found historically, of Jesus on the Cross And this was found in a middle school in Rome, in the city of Rome, scratched into the wall, so someone has some graff.ffiti. And you can't see it, it's clear on the left, that's the actual graffiti on the right. They sketched it out. And it says in Greek,leximenos worships his God. What we think is Aleximenos was one of the of the students, who was a Christian, and the kids who graffiti this portrayed Jesus on the cross as a guy with a donkey's head, because donkeys were idiots. And Lexsim inus is an idiot, because worshiping a guy who died on a cross makes you an idiot. This is the earliest representation we have of Jesus on the cross, when Paul says the word of the cross is folly, it's that. We have a hard time grasping that. That doesn't mean, though, that people in modern times don't believe that. Frederick Nietsche, who is a famous atheistic philosopher, said, this that God put himself on the cross for the salvation of mankind is the most infamous conception that has ever been set up in the world, against all reason and against the dignity of God." He said, ", he was an atheist, but he said, "Of all the ideas of God, the cross is the dumbest. It's the most ridiculous, and it robs God of all dignity." Voltaire, who was a French philosopher, said, " Christ does dying to save mankind, is the grandest idea in religion, but reason revolts against it. It's the best idea ever, but human reason just said, "This is ridiculous. It's folly. Thomas Paine, one of the founding fathers who wrote the book Common Sense said this.Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be true The Christian system of religious is an outrage on common sense. It's folly to Thomas Paine. Richard Dawkins, a modern day atheist, atheist, and biologist, says, I have described atonement as vicious sadomasochistic and repellent, if God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them without having himself tortured and executed in payment. The idea that the cross is folly in the first century, made perfect sense to Paul and everyone else. For us, it's harder, but even these quotes show that throughout history, people say, the cross is just folly to those who are perishing, those who are passing away, who aren't seenking God. He says, "It's folly, but to those who are being saved, it is the power of God." Paul in, his letter to the Romans, said, "I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believesves to the Jew 1, and also to the Greek. When he says it's the power of God for salvation, what is Paul talking about? I think he has in mind the resurrection of Jesus because because death is the thing that ends us. And if you go, how do I avoid that? We can talk about having a good life and worldly wisdom for all the things that make our life happy. But we know, day in and day out, no matter how good life is, it's coming to an end, that death ends it. And so the idea of how do we get past death? How do I get away from death? Paul was saying,Jesus died, and then he rose again. He's alive. If Jesus isn't alive, there's zero power in the message that he died and rose again. Paul staked everything on the truth that Jesus died on a cross, and three days later, physically rose, not metaphorically, not in his heart, but physically rose, and Paul met him on the road to Damascus. And now he goes around sharing this message. So why does Paul think that the gospel, the good news, is God's power for salvation? It's not how it made him feel It's not that he went, man, I like the idea, it gives me comfort. It soothes my troubled spirit. It may have done all those things. But Paul would have said, "The reason I believe the cross is God's power for salvation is that Jesus isn't dead. that objective reality of Jesus' resurrection. He says, "For those who are perishing, it's ridiculous, for those who are being saved, it's God's very power. But keep looking at me. Keep looking at the passages, and we'll see that God makes worldly wisdom foolish, looking at verses 19 to 23. For it is written I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning, I will thwart." So Paul, when he says,, "Look, the cross is followed to those who are perishing, power of God to those who who are being saved by him. He says, "I can show you from the Old Testament that this was how God was going to do things, and he quit quotes from Isaiah 29. Isaiah 29, 13 and 14 says this.And the Lord said, "Bause this people draw near me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me. and their fear of me as a commandment taught by men, therefore, behold, I will again do wonderful things with this people, with wonder upon wonder, and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning men shall be hidden." Isaiah was writing about 700 so B.C, and he was saying to the Jewish people who weren't following God from their heart. They were lip services, to God. They said, "Well, a man said, I should fear God, so I'll fear God." And Isaiah says, "God's going to come to you, and he's going to take away the wisdom of the wise people, who think they have all the answers, who think they can serve God with their lips, but not their hearts, who think they can fear God, because some man said it, not because God himself is worthy of fear He says, I am going to thwart their wisdom." And so Paul says, "Look, the Old Testament validates what God is doing. And then Paul calls out the people of his age, the wise ones. Look what he says in verse 20. Where is the one who is wise?" The wise one in Paul's mind at this time would have been probably a Greek philosopher the men who spent years and years thinking about how the world works and how we should live in the world. He says, "Where is the wisewood? Come on. He's calling him to a debate. He's calling him. He said, "Come bring the wise ones to me, and let's see what they have." He says, "Where is the scribe?" The scribe would have been the Jewish priest, or the Jewish scholar who had been studying scripture, trying to figure out what it meant. Paul would have been a scribe before he met Jesus. He would have done that type of study. He says, "Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Where are those who are debating how the world should work?" We use the word " worldview Like, what's your worldview, which is how do you see the world and how the world should work? This There are, as an illustration, that worldviews really matter. If you went to culinary school, cooking school, anyone here gone to cooking school? Nobody. All right, I was going to see if I could get a time to come over to your house and, hey, hang out. But if you went to cooking school, there's a lot of different ways to cook, right? But there are some certain things in cooking school that if you go, if you don't cook food a certain way, it can kill you. If you put certain ingredients in food, like arsenic, it can kill you. And so certain culinary worldviews could be extremely dangerous if you're not doing things correctly. We have a tendency in our cultural believe, believe, to say worldviews are just what you have. You view the world a certain way, Sam, you view it a certain way, you view it, Dylan a certain way, we all got our different views of the world. We'll just go live, it'd be okay. Worldviews, like certain ingredients in food that can be poisonous, are poisonous. They can be highly destructive. And so Paul says, "Come on, bring all of you on. Where are they? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" Paul calls all of the philosophies of the world together, and he said, "Let's talk about it, 'Cause God, Jesus coming back from the dead, makes all of this foolish. Enlightenment rationalism of the 17th and 18th century, with guys like Voltaire and David, Human Emmanuel Kant said, "The only thing we can really accept is what our human reason can accept. And if human reason can accept that a dead man came back from the grave, then it must not have happened And Enlightenment rationalism took our minds, our feeble little minds, and said, that's a sum total for the way the world is, which offers no hope for death. It just says it's gonna happen. Couple out with scientific materialism, which says there is no God, the world is just what it is. And there's no sense of a beyond, because we can't get our grip on it. Guys like Frederick Nietzche, who says said, he's an atheist, and he said, "Look, if the world's just here and there's no higher power, there's no morality, then everyone gets to create their own morality, and humanity, our life is simplyply the law of the jungle. The strong survive in the weak parish, so just be a strong person. Do what you want, but be strong enough to take care of it, and all morality goes away. Modern day existentialism argued that, look, we know there's no meaning. Nothing really matters, but we got to fake it. We got to act like it does, because who can live in this sad world? Guys like Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre. Then postmodernism comes along and postmodernism says, "Look, there is no real truth. Everything's just relative, so we all get to pick our own ways. because it's rejecting over and over the truth of what Scripture has says. All of these reject the idea that a man died on a cross and rose again in three days. None of them offer, none of them offer a way to be beat death. None of them offer a way to deal with our sin. And Paul says,Bring all of these people together, and let's have a discussion about it." Verse 21, for sense, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through the wisdom. It pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. Paul says, look, in humanity's wisdom, all the philosophers of all the ages they never figured it out. They never had an answer that had to deal with the ultimate problem in the world, which is sin and death. They don't have an answer for that. It says, God was pleased through the folly of what we preach. So Paul saying, "You think it's folly, but this is how he saved those who believe In Romans, Paul wrote this, saying that God's revealed himself to everybody in nature. We know that he exists, but that we have suppressed that truth because we want to do things our own way. Vse 21 of Romans 1. For although they knew God, they needed glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile, and the foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools. You see the language from 1st Corinthians? He says,They think they're so wise by rejecting God." He says, "But you become a fool, and you've exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being in birds, and animals, and reptiles. The thing you have started worshiping as you've rejected God isn't God. The Omnipotent, all powerful, all knowing, all loving, infinite God He said, humans have reduced that down to images of men and animals and birds and reptiles. In our modern day and age, we probably don't have an idol sitting at your house, like on a stand, and you would go, "There's my God." But something in a person's life is the most important thing And whatever that thing is, if it's not God, it's something way less than God. It could be a football team. It could be a spouse, it could be children, it could be a job. All of these small things in comparison to God's greatness. And Paul says, "Look God is working to save us through the folly of the message of the cross versus 22,F Jews demand signs, and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. Paul takes both the groups, and he says, "Jews, the Jewish people, demand signs. And what he meant by that, and Jesus himself even attestsed this when Jesus was on the earth he did all sorts of miracles, if you know the gospel stories, right? He saw a blind man, and he healed him. He saw this man who couldn't walk, and he made him walk. He saw a man with a withered arm, and he healed it immediately. He saw a man who was dead and he made him alive. He fed 5,000 people with just five fish. Just amazing things, and the Jewish people still, those who were opposed to him would come to him, Matthew 12, he says this, and say, "Can you give us a sign that would show us you are who you say you are? He'd been giving signs all along.. They just didn't want to hear it. They didn't want to see it. So he says this,An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah, for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great face, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The Jewish people in their culture, the way viewed were like,Just give us another sign, give us another sign. They did this with Moses. Moses brings them out of Egypt. God parts the Red Sea. They get into the Sinai Peninsula, and they go, "Yeah, but are you really for us? Could you give us another sign?" So he gives a mana. Yeah, but could you give me another sign? And so he gives them these quail. Yeah, but could you give me another sign Maybe that's you. Maybe that's your thing. God, can I just get one more sign? I saw that one, but I'm gonna I need another one now. I need more proof. Jesus' answer was this, I'll give you one sign to those people who are opposing him. I'll be dead for three days, then I'll come back. You will want a sign? There's your sign. Take it or leave it. That's the sign he gave them. And then he says that the Greeks seek wisdom. They go, "I just want to I want to be able to answer the question on on my own. I want to seek out how the people in the world have come up with "How do we live life? How should we live life?" He says, "But we breached Christ, crucified a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles." Butin Paul ends this way in verse 24 and 25, God's foolish weakness is stronger and wise. Look at what he says,But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God, for the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. Paul just flips the whole argument on it and said, the Corinthians, likely had been challenging Paul in some way. They came out of them. Now, remember, these weren't people who grew up in church. They grew up in their pagan temples, and they had become followers of Christ, and and they were still wrestling with, what does this mean? And this guy was crucified. That's so shameful, but this is how God's doing it. They would have felt that kind of old folly that they would have thought of. And they were probably being challenged by their neighbors and friends, going, "You know, what you believe is really stupid and ridiculous. And this guy who came and spoke to you, Paul, he didn't speak very well. He didn't market his stuff really well. He was kind of pathetic looking. That's your guy? And Paul is trying to show them that to those who are called, Christ is the power of God, in the wisdom of God, and God's power, God's weakness is greater than humanity's power, and God's foolishness is so much wiser than human wisdom. Why? Because Jesus came back from this dead. That's the key to what he's saying. He says, "But to those who are called, and this is something we need to know,'cause Paul said in verse 21, that everyone who believed Christ is the power of God to self salvation, and here he says to those who are called, "We don't seek God God seeks us." John, in his first letter, John was one of Jesus's disciples. In his first letter, he wrote, he says this,We love others because God first loved us. It's not that we love people, and then we created a God of love. It's that God loves, and so because he loves us, we can love others. That same John wrote, probably the most famous verse in scripture, F God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in H should not perish, but have everlasting life. God's the one seeking us. Everyone in here who has accepted Christ, God sought you before you ever sought Him. God was coming after you with the good news of his son, before you ever thought, I should go find God. If you went to find find God on your own, you went to your build to God workshop, and you made your own God. But God calls us, God is the one initiating. We are the ones who are called to believe. Paul says for everyone who believes this foolish message of a man who had been crucified and came back from the dead, becomes the power of God for salvation. Why? Because this man who died rose against and is no longer dead. He has defeated death, and he now can offer us access into God's presence. So what do we do with this some 2,000 years later? Remember the main point of this message, God's power of salvation is found in the foolish weakness of the cross of Christ. And that foolish weakness should help motivate us. The first thing I want you to see is this that the cross bankrupts our build a God workshop, that the cross runs our desire to make God after our own image out of business. If you want to meet God on God's terms, you have to get rid of your desire to create God on your terms. God isn't determined by what we think of him, what we want him to be. We open up scripture, and we say, God, God, show me who you are, and I will conform my thinking to what you have shown me, not conform you to what I think. I don't get to build God. God builds us And he starts by saying, I have come, God, the Son, in human form, as a human to die for your sins, to deal with the separation or rebellion against God has created, so that we can stand in His presence cleansed and holy, that we can be saved from death. Why? Because Jesus came back from the dead. The good news of Christ is the end of you saving yourself, of you getting to determine what's best for yourself, of you getting to determine how to live your own life, like Adam and Eve, when they saw the fruit that God said, "Don't eat," they said, "Ah, but it looks good. I think it'll be good. I think I should eat it and find out." The gospel, the good news of Jesus, ends all of that. We don't get to build a God God's already there. We get built in his image when we accept His Son. And so if you're here, you, I haven't accepted Christ. I want to encourage you to accept Christ. and put aside the foolish wisdom of the world and embrace the wisdom of God and the power of God. And second, for those of you who are believers, the gospel is its own attraction. And I think this is so important in our day and age that we worry and wrestle as Christians with, can I present the gospel in such a way that it'll be appealing to people? that they'll be attracted by it. Paul tells us, they're not going to be. If you go out this week and share your belief in Jesus with a coworker, and he says, "Well, that's stupid, you should go,H okay. Paul told me that they would think it's stupid. You shouldn't be shocked.You shouldn't. In fact, what you shouldn't expect is to go, someone who goes, "I don't believe what you're saying, but man, that's like the wisest thing I've ever heard. A man died on a cross for my sins and rose again.W, that's amazing. I don't believe it. I'm not going to accept it, but that's so cool. That's like the best thing ever. No, what we should expect is someone who really thinks about it to go, that makes no sense to me. How can that weakness, that humiliation be God? God's all powerful. He can just come and end things. He can come and make everything right however he wants. And he comes that way, that that's foolishness. What we think is, I have to be able to share the gospel in such an eloquent way and have all the answers, then this person will be persuaded intellectually. I will have changed their thinking enough, and then they will accept Christ. Paul's saying the exact opposite. What he's saying is, I showed up, I didn't speak well, I didn't look good. He says it's elsewhere, that he's kind of an ugly guy. He said, I didn't look good. I was wouldn't have been the guy that the marketing department picked to sell their item. And he said, "That's a good thing, because I don't have to sell the item. There's an old phrase called called Gilding the Lily, and it's an idea that a lily is this beautiful plant, and you don't have to add anything to it to make it better. The gospel is beautiful. God doesn't need our slick marketing. He doesn't need your well planned execution of a message. He just needs you to tell. He says, the gospel has its own power, it's its own attraction. That frees you and me when we share our faith, to go, one, I think some of you are going to think of I'm an idiot when I do this. You're going to think this is foolish, Paul said so. And you accepting it has nothing to do with how well I present it. It has to do with the message itself carries as its own inner power, its own attraction that brings people in. Here at Northland, we want to be very aware of people who are coming to church you aren't believe believers. Maybe you're here and you're not a believer, and a friend brought you, and you're like, "I'll go check this thing out." There was a few decades ago, a movement called the Seeer Sensitive Movement. Within that movement, some people got way off the rails and what they said was this. Here's what we need to do in church, when unbelievers are showing up, we need to kind of dumb down and water down the gospel so we don't offend them. This idea of Jesus dying for this sin, let's just not talk about that. We'll get them in, and eventually we'll convince them that we're nice enough and good enough, and then maybe they'll say yes to Chris Shalen and join us. That's a wrong way to approach how to share your faith. At Northw, we want you, if you walk into this building, if you're an unbeliever, hopefully the coffee's good, you know. It's not the best in the city. I'm I'll be honest with that, but it's not bad. You know, we have a nice lobby. You know, the bathroom is okay now. It used to not be so much before we built new ones. But we want you to have a good experience. We don't want you to be offended when you walk in the lobby just because people are mean or other things. But once you hear about Jesus, that he died for you, that you're a sinner, and you need him to save you, if you're offended by that, we're okay with that. I'm okay. Because Paul said it's gonna be offensive to people.. I'm okay with that. We want you, if you're gonna be offended, be offended by the gospel. And hopefully we say it in a way that's not offensive. We're not jerks, we're not yelling at you. We're not screaming at you and up're not being mean to you. We're saying, God loves you, we love you. But here's the truth of this message, and it's offensive It's foolishness. And we're not relying on a slick presentation, although we want to present it as well as well we can. We don't think that's how someone's going to believe. Someone's going to believe, because the gospel carries its own power. When you go out this week, church to share your faith, it's not on you. And if you think it is, you've got the gospel backwards. You're thinking, I'm good enough. I convinced Wally to believe the gospel. I'm amazing. No, you didn't. It's the gospel has its own power. God gets all the glory for us just saying, "I'm here to tell you." And when you accept it, you would go, "Man, God, you a you are amazing. You get all the glory for this person saying " yes, because I didn't do a good job. I wasn't good enough to overcome how they would think it's such folly to believe. So if you're here and you're trying to build your own God, put your faith in Christ, meet the one true God, who died and rose again and has overcome death. And if you're hearing you're a believer, go out this week in confidence and share your faith. knowing that some people will say you're foolish, and some people will go from perishing to being saved, from seeing the cross as foolish to seeing the cross is God's power. power for salvation, that His foolish weakness is in fact the power that he uses to save us all. Will you join me in prayer? Father, we love you, and we thank you for your Son, for His grace and mercy. Father, we praise you that you have shown us who you are, and that you have turned our wisdom, our building, a God workshop upside down, and I pray that through the power of your message, that you promise in your word, that people would come to trust in you today. And about this week, as we go out and share in all the encounters we have with people, your love, and how you have changed us, that that message would help people to go from perishing to being saved, from seeing the cross as folly, to seeing it as the very power of God for salvation, that you would be glorified, and your name would be made much of. It's in the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.