Study Desk

For men of that stamp are not bondservants of Christ our Lord, but are slaves to their own appetites; and by their plausible words and their flattery they utterly deceive the minds of the simple.

I thank my God continually on your behalf for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus--

so that there is no gift of God in which you consciously come short while patiently waiting for the reappearing of our Lord Jesus Christ,

For I have been distinctly informed, my brethren, about you by Chloe's people, that there are dissensions among you.

for fear people should say that you were baptized to be my adherents.

For the Message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are on the way to perdition, but it is the power of God to those whom He is saving.

For so it stands written, "I will exhibit the nothingness of the wisdom of the wise, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will bring to nought."

For after the world by its wisdom--as God in His wisdom had ordained--had failed to gain the knowledge of God, God was pleased, by the apparent foolishness of the Message which we preach, to save those who accepted it.

For consider, brethren, God's call to you. Not many who are wise with merely human wisdom, not many of position and influence, not many of noble birth have been called.

But you--and it is all God's doing--are in Christ Jesus: He has become for us a wisdom which is from God, consisting of righteousness and sanctification and deliverance;

And as for myself, brethren, when I came to you, it was not with surpassing power of eloquence or earthly wisdom that I came, announcing to you that which God had commanded me to bear witness to.

For I determined to be utterly ignorant, when among you, of everything except of Jesus Christ, and of Him as having been crucified.

a wisdom which not one of the leaders of the present age possesses, for if they had possessed it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory.

But--to use the words of Scripture--we speak of things which eye has not seen nor ear heard, and which have never entered the heart of man: all that God has in readiness for them that love Him.

For us, however, God has drawn aside the veil through the teaching of the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, including the depths of the divine nature.

For, among human beings, who knows a man's inner thoughts except the man's own spirit within him? In the same way, also, only God's Spirit is acquainted with God's inner thoughts.

For who has penetrated the mind of the Lord, and will instruct Him? But *we* have the mind of Christ.

And as for myself, brethren, I found it impossible to speak to you as spiritual men. It had to be as to worldlings--mere babes in Christ.

I fed you with milk and not with solid food, since for this you were not yet strong enough. And even now you are not strong enough:

you are still unspiritual. For so long as jealousy and strife continue among you, can it be denied that you are unspiritual and are living and acting like mere men of the world?