God

I thank my God always for you because of God’s love and kindness given to you through the Messiah Yeshua,

God is trustworthy: it was he who called you into fellowship with his Son, Yeshua the Messiah, our Lord.

I thank God that I didn’t immerse any of you except Crispus and Gaius —

For the message about the execution-stake is nonsense to those in the process of being destroyed, but to us in the process of being saved it is the power of God.

Where does that leave the philosopher, the Torah-teacher, or any of today’s thinkers? Hasn’t God made this world’s wisdom look pretty foolish?

For God’s wisdom ordained that the world, using its own wisdom, would not come to know him. Therefore God decided to use the “nonsense” of what we proclaim as his means of saving those who come to trust in it.

but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, this same Messiah is God’s power and God’s wisdom!

For God’s “nonsense” is wiser than humanity’s “wisdom.” And God’s “weakness” is stronger than humanity’s “strength.”

But God chose what the world considers nonsense in order to shame the wise; God chose what the world considers weak in order to shame the strong;

and God chose what the world looks down on as common or regards as nothing in order to bring to nothing what the world considers important;

It is his doing that you are united with the Messiah Yeshua. He has become wisdom for us from God, and righteousness and holiness and redemption as well!

As for me, brothers, when I arrived among you, it was not with surpassing eloquence or wisdom that I came announcing to you the previously concealed truth about God;

so that your trust might not rest on human wisdom but on God’s power.

On the contrary, we are communicating a secret wisdom from God which has been hidden until now but which, before history began, God had decreed would bring us glory.

But, as the Tanakh says, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard and no one’s heart has imagined all the things that God has prepared for those who love him.”

It is to us, however, that God has revealed these things. How? Through the Spirit. For the Spirit probes all things, even the profoundest depths of God.

For who knows the inner workings of a person except the person’s own spirit inside him? So too no one knows the inner workings of God except God’s Spirit.

Now we have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit of God, so that we might understand the things God has so freely given us.

Now the natural man does not receive the things from the Spirit of God — to him they are nonsense! Moreover, he is unable to grasp them, because they are evaluated through the Spirit.

I planted the seed, and Apollos watered it, but it was God who made it grow.

So neither the planter nor the waterer is anything, only God who makes things grow —

For we are God’s co-workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.

Using the grace God gave me, I laid a foundation, like a skilled master-builder; and another man is building on it. But let each one be careful how he builds.

Don’t you know that you people are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?

So if anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you yourselves are that temple.