By Dean Collins
Wouldn’t you rather be on the winning side? During college football season, we hear and see a lot of boasting about whose team is the best in the state, the conference, and the nation. Every day there is another article about who has the best quarterback, the best defense, the best offense, and so on. But we rarely hear anyone boast about having the worst team. Usually, if your team isn’t doing well, you might hear someone say, “We are just awful.” That is not a point of boasting but perhaps simply an acknowledgment of their team’s current abilities.
I did a little research on what we tend to boast or brag about on social media. The list includes our favorite teams, our children and grandchildren, our success with weight loss or a new achievement in our exercise regimen, our vacation destinations, and often our job success or promotions.
In some ways, there probably isn’t anything wrong with being proud of some of these things. But if we aren’t careful, we might discover that what we are revealing through our boasting is that we have adopted more of the world’s values than those of the kingdom of God. Our culture tends to celebrate power, wealth, fame, and human accomplishment. Yet the teachings of Jesus and Paul point us in the opposite direction. Even a casual reading of the Sermon on the Mount reveals that Jesus described and initiated a kingdom that stands in sharp contrast to the values of this world.
At the end of 1 Corinthians 1, we read:
“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption,” so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
These words are so countercultural that we are often tempted to breeze past them rather than slow down and consider how much we allow ourselves to reflect the values of the world instead of the things Jesus said were foundational to His kingdom. It was through the humiliation of Christ’s suffering and death on a cross that God demonstrated His power over sin and death.
Paul challenges us not to get caught up in the things of this world but to celebrate and even boast not in what we can do but in what Christ has done for us. And when we surrender to Christ, God, through the Holy Spirit, releases in us a power that brings not only victory over death but also victory over everything the world tells us is important.
Father, today we are humbled as we remember what Christ did for us on the cross. We surrender once again to what many see as foolishness but what we understand to be wisdom and strength through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Your Time with God’s Word
1 Corinthians 1: 18-31 ESV
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