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Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed.
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A Church Divided Over Leaders
I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.
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I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius,
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so no one can say that you were baptized in my name.
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For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
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Christ Crucified Is God’s Power and Wisdom
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
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Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
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For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.
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Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.
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God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are,
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so that no one may boast before him.
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And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.
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For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
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My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power,
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so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
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God’s Wisdom Revealed by the Spirit
We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.
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No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.
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None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
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However, as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”— the things God has prepared for those who love him—
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For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
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What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us.
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This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words.
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The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
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The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments,
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The Church and Its Leaders
Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ.
