1 Cô-rinh-tô 2

Preaching Christ crucified

¹For my part, brothers and sisters, when I came to you and announced God’s testimony to you, I did not come with impressive speech or superior wisdom.^{a 2}My decision was this: while I was among you, the only thing I would know was Jesus Christ, and him as the one who was crucified. ³While I was with you, I was weak and afraid, and I trembled greatly. ⁴My message and my preaching did not depend on wisdom’s power to persuade; they were proof given by the Spirit and by power, ⁵so that your faith would be grounded not in human wisdom but in the power of God.^b

God’s wisdom revealed by the Spirit

⁶There is a wisdom we speak, all the same, among those who are mature. It is not the wisdom of this present age, nor of its rulers, whose power is already being brought to an end.^{c 7}Instead, the wisdom we speak is God’s own, a mystery that has been kept hidden. God planned it before the ages for our glory. ⁸Not one of this age’s rulers grasped this wisdom. Had they grasped it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. ⁹But this is what Scripture describes: “Things no eye ever saw and no ear ever heard, things that never rose up in any human heart: these God has made ready for those who love him.”^{d 10}And it is to us that God has made them known, through the Spirit. For nothing is beyond the Spirit’s searching, not even the depths of God. ¹¹After all, what human being knows what is going on inside someone else? Only that person’s own spirit within knows it. In the same way, the things of God are known to no one but the Spirit of God. ¹²We, for our part, have not received the spirit of the world. We have received the Spirit who comes from God, so that we may recognize all that God has graciously given us. ¹³When we speak of these things, our words are not lessons learned from human wisdom. The Spirit teaches them, and so we explain spiritual things in words the Spirit gives.^e

The natural person and the spiritual person

¹⁴A person who has only natural life does not welcome what belongs to the Spirit of God. It all seems foolish to such a person, who cannot grasp it, because it can be weighed rightly only by the Spirit. ¹⁵But the spiritual person is able to assess all things, while no one is in a position to assess such a person. ¹⁶For “who has ever known the mind of the Lord well enough to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.