The Cross and Christian Ministry: Leadership Lessons from 1 Corinthians

The only thing of transcendent importance to human beings is the knowledge of God. This knowledge does not belong to those who endlessly focus on themselves. Those who truly come to know God delight just to know him. He becomes their center. They think of him, delight in him, boast of him.

The gospel of the crucified Messiah must transform not only our beliefs but our behavior.

It is the truth and power of the gospel that must change people’s lives, not the glamour of our oratory or the emotional power of our stories.

Focus on Christ crucified. That is what Paul did: “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2). This does not mean that this was a new departure for Paul, still less that Paul was devoted to blissful ignorance of anything and everything other than the cross. No, what he means is that all he does and teaches is tied to the cross. He cannot long talk about Christian joy, or Christian ethics, or Christian fellowship, or the Christian doctrine of God, or anything else, without finally tying it to the cross. Paul is gospel-centered; he is cross-centered. That

In the first place, Paul says, the utter bankruptcy of all the world’s efforts to know God was part of God’s wise design. It was “in the wisdom of God” that “the world through its wisdom did not know him” (1:21). Not only did the wise and the scholars and the philosophers fail to understand, God in his all-wise providence actually worked it out that way. Their failures are thoroughly blameworthy; their ignorance of God and their endless, self-centered preoccupation are culpable. Nevertheless, no evil, certainly not theirs, can escape the bounds of God’s sovereign providence—and it is God himself who ensures that the world in its wisdom does not know him.

The heart of our lostness is our profound self-focus. We do not want to know him, if knowing him is on his terms. We are happy to have a god we can more or less manipulate; we do not want a god to whom we admit that we are rebels in heart and mind, that we do not deserve his favor, and that our only hope is in his pardoning and transforming grace.

The cross not only establishes what we are to preach, but how we are to preach. It prescribes what Christian leaders must be and how Christians must view Christian leaders. It tells us how to serve and draws us onward in discipleship until we understand what it means to be world Christians. The

Our self-centeredness is deep. It is so brutally idolatrous that it tries to domesticate God himself. In our desperate folly we act as if we can outsmart God, as if he owes us explanations, as if we are wise and self-determining while he exists only to meet our needs.

Faithful Christian leaders must make the connections between creed and conduct, between the cross and how to live. And they must exemplify this union in their own lives. In

For the better we know God, the more we will want all of our existence to revolve around him,

At heart, therefore, they really have grasped the message of Christ crucified, even if they have not brought their lives into conformity with this message.

It is not that God makes us constitutionally unable to understand him, and then toys with us for his own amusement. Rather, he has made us for himself, but we have run from him. The heart of our lostness is our profound self-focus.

This lesson is especially important when so many Christians today identify themselves with some “single issue” (a concept drawn from politics) other than the cross, other than the gospel. It is not that they deny the gospel. If pressed, they will emphatically endorse it. But their point of self-identification, the focus of their minds and hearts, what occupies their interest and energy, is something else: a style of worship, the abortion issue, homeschooling, the gift of prophecy, pop sociology, a certain brand of counseling, or whatever. Of course, all of these issues have their own importance. Doubtless we need some Christians working on them full time. But even those who are so engaged must do so as an extension of the gospel, as an extension of the message of the cross. They must take special pains to avoid giving any impression that being really spiritual or really insightful or really wise turns on an appropriate response to their issue.

These questions miss the point. There is a kind of longing for a display of Jesus’s power that is entirely godly, submissive, perhaps even desperate. There is another kind that puts the person making the request into the driver’s seat. Some want to see Jesus perform a sign so that they can evaluate him, assess his claims, test his credentials.

O argumento de Paulo é que nenhuma filosofia popular, nenhuma ‘sabedoria’ aceita por todos, pode ter importância duradoura, se o seu âmago não é a cruz. Não importa quais sejam os méritos ou os deméritos desses vários sistemas, eles exaurem seus recursos em níveis superficiais. Não reconciliam os homens e mulheres com o Deus vivo. E nada é mais importante do que isso. Esses sistemas não podem desvendar a sabedoria de Deus na cruz. E, se a cruz está oculta, todas as outras sabedorias são tolice. Onde está o sábio?

The point is that however much the Old Testament points to Jesus, much of this prophecy is in veiled terms—in types and shadows and structures of thought.

Why is it that we constantly parade Christian athletes, media personalities, and pop singers? Why should we think that their opinions or their experiences of grace are of any more significance than those of any other believer? When we tell outsiders about people in our church, do we instantly think of the despised and the lowly who have become Christians, or do we love to impress people with the importance of the men and women who have become Christians? Modern Western evangelicalism is deeply infected with the virus of triumphalism, and the resulting illness destroys humility, minimizes grace, and offers far too much homage to the money and influence and “wisdom” of our day.

O mundo antigo empregava várias polaridades para descrever a humanidade: romanos e bárbaros, judeus e gentios, escravos e livres. Todavia, nesta passagem, Paulo apresentou a única polaridade que tem importância crucial; ele distinguiu os que perecem e os que são salvos. A linha divisória entre os dois grupos é a mensagem da cru: ‘A palavra da cruz é loucura para os que se perdem, mas para nós, que somos salvos, poder de Deus’ (1Co 1. 18).

In the context, the “spiritual man” is the person with the Holy Spirit, over against “the man without the Spirit.” The “spiritual man,” in short, is the Christian, not a member of an elite coterie of Christians.

When my daughter was born, my wife found herself unable to nurse our infant. That gave me the privilege of sharing the midnight feedings. Tiffany was a dream: I could zap the formula in the microwave, change her, feed her the whole eight ounces, and tuck her back into her crib—all in under twenty minutes. Then our son came along. Midnight feedings with him were horrendous. Although he had an enormous appetite, he sucked and drank with only three speeds: slow, dead slow, and stop. Worse, he had to be burped every ounce or so—a painfully slow process—or he would display his remarkable gift for projectile vomiting. Without any warning, he could upchuck what he had taken in and send it fifteen feet across the room. If there were an Olympic event in projectile vomiting, he would have taken one of the medals. I never got him back into his crib in under an hour; an hour and a half was more common.

We must frankly recognize that this stance is alien to much of our experience in the Western world. Until fairly recently, even the unconverted in the West largely adhered to Judeo-Christian values. However, that consensus is eroding rapidly, and as it does there will be more and more overt opposition to any form of Christianity that tries to maintain allegiance to the Bible.

Building the church with superficial “conversions” and wonderful programs that rarely bring people into a deepening knowledge of the living God will do it. Entertaining people to death but never fostering the beauty of holiness or the centrality of self-crucifying love will build an assembly of religious people, but it will destroy the church of the living God.

Clearly the Corinthians adopted their own form of this over-realized eschatology. It was tied to their pride, their endless one-upmanship.

Thus the demand for signs becomes the prototype of every condition human beings raise as a barrier to being open to God. I will devote myself to this God if he heals my child. I will follow this Jesus if I can maintain my independence. I will happily become a Christian if God proves himself to me. I will turn from my sin and read the Bible if my marriage gets sorted out to my satisfaction. I will acknowledge Jesus as Lord if he performs the kind of miracle, on demand, that removes all doubt. In every case, I am assessing him; he is not assessing me. I am not coming to him on his terms; rather, I am stipulating terms that he must accept if he wants the privilege of my company. “Jews demand miraculous signs.

The pace of change is so fast that different generations are clashing with each other almost like competing cultures. For example, the radically different tastes in music that divide many congregations at the moment are, in part, culture clashes. And it is not easy to be wise. Some wag has said that the last seven words of the church will be, “We’ve always done it this way before.” On the other hand, I have some sympathy for the position of C. S. Lewis, who maintained that he could put up with almost any pattern of corporate worship, so long as it did not change too often. His point is that mere novelty is in fact distracting. The deepest and best corporate worship takes place when the forms are so familiar you never see them and can penetrate the reality.

Still, whatever he means by saying he is not free from God’s law, there is something intuitively obvious about it. We can easily hear Paul saying, “To the Jew I became a Jew,” and “To the Gentile I became a Gentile”; we cannot imagine him saying, “To the gossip I became a gossip,” and “To the adulterer I became an adulterer.” In other words, while saying he is not under the law as other Jews were, he certainly does not mean to suggest he is an utter antinomian (someone who feels completely free from all of God’s demands and commands).

That God’s grace empowers our works destroys all mechanical merit theology: so much work, so much pay. At the end of the day, we work and serve with the end in view and constantly remember that if we are fruitful it is because God’s grace is at work within us.

Christian leaders do not try to be independent gurus, all-wise teachers. They see themselves simply as servants and want other Christians to see them that way, too. But they are servants of one particular Master: they serve Jesus Christ.

Has the smoothness of the performance become more important to us than the fear of the Lord? Has polish, one of the modern equivalents of ancient rhetoric, displaced substance? Have professional competence and smooth showmanship become more valuable than sober reckoning over what it means to focus on Christ crucified?

It is possible so to lionize some Christian leader that we start making excuses for his or her serious, perhaps even catastrophic, faults. What we must remember is that the leaders are no more than servants.