EXCERPT: Starting in chapter 2, on Pentecost, to the end, chapter 28, verse 31, you heard me say that the Word was preached and the church was growing and they ran out of usable numbers--explosive growth for a message that is unacceptable to the Jews, detestable to the Gentiles. Paul says it’s a stumbling block, it’s foolishness, he says, “And still I came and preached Christ and Him crucified.” “I didn’t come in human wisdom,” that is such an important portion of Scripture, 1 Corinthians chapter 2, where Paul makes that confession: “I was determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness, fear, much trembling. My message, my peaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. Your faith needed to rest not in the wisdom of man, but in the power of God. God knows who He will save. God will call whom He will through the preaching of the gospel by the power of the Holy Spirit--that’s all they need to know. The modern cry today for this contextualization really is a curse. The apostles and the prophets, the early preachers of the early church, took their transcendent message from Jerusalem to Rome, from the biblically literate, to the biblically illiterate, from slaves to slave owners. From people who couldn’t read and write to people who wrote books and gave lectures. From the bond to the free, from the male to the female, the Jew to the Greek. They crossed hard national, social, cultural lines and the message never changed, never changed. It was always the same message, the Word of the Lord concerning Christ, the gospel. And by the way, once the gospel was preached and then letters were sent to the churches that were established in the Gentile world, as well as in the Jewish world, the letters written adapted not at all to cultural expectations. In fact, the letters of the apostle Paul to the churches of the New Testament, the letters of Peter, the letters of John, James and Jude, are as relevant to you today two thousand years later in America as they were to the people who read them when they were first written. That’s the transcendent nature of the message.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 17:43:24 +0000
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