[1 Cor 1.16-25] 2026.08.16 The Foolish Wisdom of the Cross of Christ
[1 Cor 1.16-25] 2026.08.16 The Foolish Wisdom of the Cross of Christ
Big Idea: Don’t be a wise-sounding fool but a foolish-sounding sage, for God is pleased to save all who believe his message of Christ crucified.
1. Man’s wise-sounding problem with the Cross of Christ
2. God’s foolish-sounding answer in the Cross of Christ
3. Be foolish-sounding sages who preach and praise Christ crucified
In 2012, there was a Football (soocer) team from a place called Santa Cruz, Brazil, that played against another soccer team from Gremio.
A young man by the name of Tiago Rech went to support his team Santa Cruz.
He got there early, before other Santa Cruz supporters arrived.
The game began, and no one else came.
His team Santa Cruz scored a goal, but still, there was nobody there to celebrate with Tiago.
The game then went on with the other team winning 4-1 at the end.
Even then, there was only one man on Santa Cruz’s side: Tiago Rech.
Here’s a picture of him at that game.
His picture went viral, with different people saying different things about Tiago.
Why didn’t any other supporter turn up?
Maybe they didn’t really believe in their team; maybe they thought they would be embarrassed by the result.
We don’t like to be embarrassed, don’t we?
We want to be with the winners, not losers.
Sometimes, we might be tempted to feel that way about the Bible’s message.
Why might we be tempted to find the preaching of the message and of the cross embarrassing?
We might think that the message the Church teaches is outdated.
Sometimes, we might think of the Church itself as weak and need to be propped up.
Can you think of other reasons why we might be tempted to find the preaching and the message of the cross embarrassing?
This is nothing new. In fact, we’ll see this same kind of attitude even back in the early days of the Church.
If you have your Bible there, please open up with me to 1 Corinthians 1, beginning from verse 18.
We’ll see three things in today’s passage:
1. Man’s wise-sounding problem with the Cross of Christ
2. God’s foolish-sounding answer in the Cross of Christ
3. Be foolish-sounding sages who preach and praise Christ crucified
Before we look into it, let’s pray, “Speak, O Lord, and by your Holy Spirit, help us to listen, that we may obey and live a life that brings your glory and not shame. For Christ’s sake, Amen.”
1. Man’s wise-sounding problem with the Cross of Christ
To many people we know, the message of the cross sounds crazy.
Sometimes, even scholars and scientists who have done a lot of research say that the message about Jesus dying on the cross sounds crazy.
In fact, the message of the cross of Jesus has always sounded a little crazy, fit only for naïve fools.
Listen to what the Bible says in the first half of 1 Corinthians 1:18, “For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.”
Dr Sam Chan, a gifted evangelist, has told this story to tell us how strange the gospel might sound to someone:
Imagine I told you this:
“Last night, while my wife and I were watching TV, a UFO landed in our back yard. A green alien got out of the UFO and asked us to join him. So my wife and I got into his UFO, and he took us to his home planet, Jupiter. There he showed us around his home city. We had dinner with his family. Afterward, we got into the UFO and returned to earth. But when we got back, because of the space-time continuum, we went through a time portal, and only one second of earth time had passed.”
Do you believe me?
Let’s say I tell you another story:
Two thousand years ago, God sent us his Son, Jesus.
He was born from a virgin!
While he was on earth, he healed sick people and raised dead people back to life.
And then he died on a cross.
If you believe this, he will take away all your sins and forgive you.
When you die, your soul will leave your dead body to be with Jesus in heaven.
And one day, he will return and set up a kingdom on earth.
And when he does, your dead body will rise from the grave and be reunited to your soul.
Do you believe me?
It can sound crazy, right?
Of course, we probably don’t tell the story exactly like that, we expand on it, we put illustrations in, we use our life’s example to make it easier for people to understand it.
But at the heart of the gospel message is the crucified Christ.
It sounds crazy!
But it doesn’t sound crazy to everyone.
Did you notice who does the gospel sound crazy to?
Let’s read the verse again; but this time, the whole verse: For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved.
The word perishing means to be ruined or destroyed.
Their perishing is not final yet, but it will be, if they still consider the Cross of Christ to be foolish.
There’s a group of people who don’t find the message of the cross embarrassing.
It’s those of us who are being saved.
Again, this word is in present tense.
At the cross, Jesus has saved us.
Jesus also keeps saving us in our trials and temptations, as we keep trusting and following him.
And Jesus will come back to save us and to take us to heaven, because we believe that on the cross of Jesus, we see the power of God.
To those who rely on their own wisdom, the cross is a shame, it’s embarrassing; but to those who are being saved, it’s the power of God.
One message, two extreme sets of responses.
This so-called wisdom that the world claims of itself, since it stops people from trusting God, becomes something that God intends to destroy.
Look with me at verse 19, “For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will set aside the intelligence of the intelligent.”
God is not destroying all wisdom and all intelligence, but he will destroy the kind of wisdom that the so-called wise rely on, rather than trusting in him.
Verse 19 is actually taken from Isaiah 29:14.
Verse 13 says, “The Lord said: These people approach me with their speeches to honor me with lip-service , yet their hearts are far from me, and human rules direct their worship of me. Therefore, I will again confound these people with wonder after wonder. The wisdom of their wise will vanish, and the perception of their perceptive will be hidden.”
They thought that they knew better than God, that they were wiser than God’s ways, and that they could even fool God.
That’s the kind of wisdom that God will destroy.
Look with me at verse 20, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the debater of this age? Hasn’t God made the world’s wisdom foolish?”
Where are the so-called wise people, the scholar, the lawyer, the debater, who can speak against God?
Nowhere.
They definitely sound wise in their own ears.
But to God, what they say, what they believe in, is rubbish.
This is how God responds to their trust in their own wisdom, in verse 21, “For since, in God’s wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preached.”
God is pleased, he is delighted, to save people who were perishing by this message of foolishness.
Did you notice how God delivers this message?
Through preaching.
There are many ways to deliver the message of the cross, of course.
You can sing about it, you can paint it, you can even act it out.
But the one delivery that God specifically mentioned, the one that the Church has used over two thousand years, is the preaching of the Christ crucified.
The preaching of the gospel doesn’t sound very exciting today.
And, truth be told, it didn’t sound exciting back in New Testament days.
Back then, people were far more interested in debates, and arguments, and persuasion.
To preach is to simply proclaim a message.
Public speakers want to be known as engaging and persuasive, not simply proclaiming the news.
But God has decided to make preaching, the proclamation of the Cross of Christ, his MO, his modus operandi.
He doesn’t want his people to be known as eloquent debaters but faithful preachers of the gospel.
There’s a place for eloquence and debating skills, of course.
But preaching is at the heart of what God’s people, of what our Church, must do, because that’s what God’s chosen to proclaim his message.
The preacher might look and sound foolish and weak when he preaches.
But this foolish-looking way to save people is God’s choice.
Both the preacher and the preached message might seem foolish in the eyes of the world, but it’s precisely through this foolish-looking method that the all-wise God saves those who trust him and God leaves those who don’t trust him to continue in their perishing.
Lesslie Newbigin was an English missionary who went to share the gospel in India.
When he came back to England in the 1980s, he found England to be as much a mission field as India was back in the 1930s.
As a Westerner, he saw that Western culture was “the most powerful and pervasive of human cultures” and “next to Islam, it is of all human cultures the most resistant to the gospel.”
The worldly wisdom of the West sees that the gospel is foolishness.
As a church with different cultures, living in a multi-cultural city, we see plenty of the world’s rejection.
As a Church, we must always be ready to be rejected by the world.
There may be times when we are rightly treated as fools when we disobey God’s word.
However, if we’re treated as fools because we preach the cross of Christ, then, my brothers and my sisters, take heart, and remember that we’re simply doing the errands our God has given us.
If they treated our Lord as a fool and the message of the Cross as foolish, why would we think that they would treat the messenger any better?
1. God’s foolish-sounding answer in the Cross of Christ
Even so, we know that proclaiming and preaching Christ’s message is better, for God’s foolish-sounding answer is found in the Cross of Christ.
Look with me at verses 22 to 23, “For the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.”
The word translated stumbling block is the Greek word, σκάνδαλον.
That’s where we get our word scandal from.
The Cross of Christ is a scandal to the Jews.
There’s a famous scene in the movie “The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers”, where, Viggo Mortensen, one of the main actors of the movie kicked a heavy Uruk-hai (bad people) helmet in grief and frustration.
However, Viggo kicked it so hard that he broke two of his toes.
The director kept the take in the movie.
The scream was real!
That’s what it was like for a Jewish person when they hear the Cross of Christ; it was a stumbling block that made them mad and frustrated.
For thousands of years, the Jews have witnessed God’s mighty power in saving them from Egypt and in sending prophets who have demonstrated that they were really sent from God with acts of power.
They wanted to see signs from God as proof that God sent Jesus.
There was even an occasion when they asked Jesus, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from you.”
Matthew 12:38.
But Jesus answered, “An evil and adulterous generation demands a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.”
Jesus is of course talking about his death on the cross and his resurrection.
It’s a stumbling block for the Jews because they didn’t believe that God would let His Chosen One die, let alone to let him die on a humiliating Roman cross.
It’s also foolishness to the Gentiles.
The Greeks have been known to think deeply and philosophically for many years, even before Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
They wanted to see clear, logical, persuasive arguments presented so that they can make their own judgement, based on their own wisdom.
When Paul was sharing the gospel with the Greeks at Areopagus and got to the part about the resurrection of Jesus, they began to ridicule him.
Why would anyone want to rise from the dead, with a physical body?
The Greeks believed that to be free of the body is good and to keep the body is bad.
And so, to the Greeks, the cross and the resurrection of Christ are also utter foolishness.
This contempt of the cross of Christ is not just confined to the Jews and the Greeks.
We still see this attitude to the cross of Christ, don’t we?
I’ve heard people who say, “If God will do this for me when I pray, then I will believe in him”.
Like the Jews, we demand signs from God.
And like the Jews, we’ll be bitterly disappointed because the Cross of Christ is a stumbling block to those who ask for powerful signs.
Does God have to prove himself to you?
He can, but he doesn’t have to.
He’s already shown his power through the Cross of Christ.
Do you see it?
If not, the problem is not him.
It’s you.
You’re still relying on your wisdom instead of the true wisdom of trusting him.
Or, like the Greeks, we want everything to make sense to us before we believe.
And so, you go through the Bible and try to disprove God by pointing to things that don’t make sense to you.
Again, does God need to be understood by you, before you trust him?
Imagine a teenager who flippantly dismisses the law and say, “I don’t understand it, and so it must be wrong”.
And yet, that’s exactly the kind of attitude that some teenagers, adults and elderly people say about the Bible, “I don’t understand it, and so I won’t obey it. It must be wrong”.
Is it possible that they don’t understand it because they are not as smart as they think they are?
We think of God as foolish, but it’s us who are foolish.
When I was a student minister, my trainer was a Church-planter and he would often encourage me to go to church-planting conferences to learn about how to plant Churches.
Often, there will be a speaker who shares a success story about how they’ve built a church from scratch and now hundreds, even thousands of people come to Church.
I thank God for these Church planters!
However, every now and then, there would be some who would focus on the pragmatics, the results and not the foolishness that’s inherent in the Cross of Christ.
Sometimes, I would hear them talking about goals, but not God.
They would often boast about their genius, rather than Jesus.
Friends, we must be careful about what we proclaim and how we proclaim.
If all we talk about is human, worldly wisdom, and we ignore the foolish-sounding wisdom of God, we will find ourselves in danger of being counted with the perishing, rather than those being saved.
If God saves those who believe through the message of the cross, then we must keep preaching the message of the cross, no matter how embarrassing we might seem.
Even if everything in our service goes perfectly, even if the music is great and the morning tea is delicious, if the Cross of Christ is not what we live and breathe, then we’re wasting our time.
People will come and demand that we give them what they want, a powerful sign or a persuasive lecture.
But don’t give the world what they demand.
Give them the crucified Christ.
God’s placed us here as a Church so everyone, every household, will hear us preach the message of Christ Crucified.
May God not give us any new people, if we ever get embarrassed of preaching Christ crucified.
2. Be foolish-sounding sages who preach and praise Christ crucified
Instead, may God bring more of his people to us as we become foolish-sounding sages who preach and praise Christ crucified.
Look with me at verse 24, “Yet to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Those of us who are called by God do not receive a different message from the one the world mocks; we receive the same message but we come to the very opposite decision than the one the wise-sounding world made.
Instead of weakness, we see the power of God.
Instead of foolishness we see the wisdom of God.
Imagine two people standing in the pouring rain.
One is a teenager who starts getting upset because their brand-new Adidas Superstars are getting ruined.
The other is their father who looks up to heaven with a sigh of relief, like a farmer at the end of a drought.
The teenager’s father thanks God because God had finally answered his prayer for rain.
The rain has not changed.
What has changed was what they count as treasures in their hearts.
In the same way, how we respond to the Cross of Christ shows what we treasure in our hearts.
Left to ourselves, our hearts will be like the teenager in the story.
We want God to meet our demands and if we don’t get it, or if it’s embarrassing to us, we fret, we get frustrated and we behave poorly.
For us to treasure God’s rain of blessing like the farmer in the story, our hearts need to be changed.
And it can only be changed when God calls us.
In this passage, to be called by God is to be chosen by God for salvation.
Those of us who are called by God are better off, but not because we’re better.
It’s all because of his mercy and grace.
Notice also that those who are called are both Jews and Greeks.
That is, just as the world is made up of Jews and Greeks who have rejected the Cross of Christ as foolishness, God, in his mercy has also called Jews and Greeks who were once foolish to be sages because they have accepted and believed in Jesus.
The word ‘sage’ is an old word meaning ‘the wise ones’.
Those of us who once thought of ourselves as wise but were actually fools, are now made truly wise by God’s gracious calling.
Verse 25 gives a beautiful summary to why we are wise, why we are sages, for putting our trust in the Cross of Christ, “because God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
When we humans are at our strongest, be it our military power, or political power, or our buying power, God is stronger still.
When we humans are at our wisest, be it by means of our intellect, our scholarship or by our ingenuity, God is wiser still.
Don’t let what seems foolish and weak to the world fool you; it’s by these seemingly foolish and weak things that God destroys the wisdom of the wise, and makes the strongest stumble.
Earlier this week, I learnt of the death of a dear, dear friend of Jenny, a sister by the name of Elizabeth Foord.
Elizabeth was tiny.
She was shorter than Jenny, the shortest person in our family.
But boy, was she mighty!
She’s been serving God and teaching the Bible to many people both here and around the world.
At one stage, she taught eight Scripture classes a week, visited people in 12 nursing homes, ran a school lunch time Bible study group at a high school, taught Sunday school, helped out in youth group and sang in a choir.
When Jenny met her, she prayed for both me and Jenny as we prepared for our ministry here in St Paul’s Kogarah.
She was by far one of the wisest and strongest women both Jenny and I had ever met.
But you know what, she’s even wiser and stronger now, because she’s with our Lord Jesus in heaven.
I. Friends, serving here in St Paul’s Kogarah is not for the faint-hearted.
It’s hard work and it takes genuine trust in God.
If it wasn’t for a genuine trust in God, we would grow tired and weary, we would be discouraged by how weak and how foolish we look.
We might even be embarrassed and show contempt for God’s work here.
But, please, don’t be a wise-sounding fool; be a foolish-sounding sage.
Boast in the crucified Christ and no one else.
Don’t soften the scandal of the Cross of Christ.
Be brave, and tell the message of the cross plainly to your neighbour and your friend.
Don't be afraid of the friend who thinks they are too clever, too religious, too good for the gospel.
Those are exactly the people who need to hear the gospel.
Those are exactly the people for whom we must pray, asking God to call them to himself through the Gospel of the Crucified Christ.
Why might we be tempted to find the preaching of the message and of the cross embarrassing?
It sounds weak and foolish to our friends and our neighbours.
The message of the cross of Christ is embarrassing to those who are perishing.
But to us who are called, to those of us who believe, it is the wisdom and power of God, it’s the message of God’s power to those who are being saved.
And so, brothers and sisters, don’t be a wise-sounding fool but a foolish-sounding sage, for God is pleased to save all who believe his message of Christ crucified.
Remember Tiago Rech, the guy who stood alone with his losing team?
About one year after watching his team got beaten 4-1, Tiago went to the club and started working for them.
He worked hard at building the team up again, even though he had little professional experience.
He would look foolish and weak to many people in the football industry.
But he stuck at it and eventually was made president of the club.
To cut a long story short, in September 2020, eight years after he sat alone on the stand, Tiago was the president when his team won their first ever title - the Copa Federacao Gaucha de Futebol.
Here’s a picture of him after the win.
Friends, what God has for us is far better than the trophy Tiago won.
And so, don’t give up.
Don’t give up when the world looks down on you because of the weakness and the foolishness of the Cross of Christ.
Bear the shame and look forward to the day when God himself rewards you in heaven.
Here are the three questions for this week,
1. In what ways am I embarrassed by the preaching of Christ crucified?
2. Be honest and ask yourself: What evidence do I want God to give me? A powerful sign or a persuasive message? Or the foolishness and the weakness of the Cross?
3. What will I do about my wise-sounding friend who’s perishing?
There are still many people who are perishing, who need to hear this message.
Don’t stop praying for God to call them.
And if you haven’t been called yet, if you still find the message of the Crucified Christ embarrassing, then pray for God to be merciful and call you to save you.
I can’t do it; I’m only a messenger.
But God can.
Only, don’t be a wise-sounding fool but a foolish-sounding sage, for God is pleased to save all who believe his message of Christ crucified.
Three Questions
1. In what ways am I embarrassed by the preaching of Christ crucified?
2. What evidence do I want God to give me? A powerful sign or a persuasive message? Or the foolishness and the weakness of the Cross?
3. What will I do about my wise-sounding friend who’s perishing?
Don’t be a wise-sounding fool but a foolish-sounding sage, for God is pleased to save all who believe his message of Christ crucified.
Let’s pray, “Father, thank you for your mercy on people like us. We were perishing but you’ve called us to save us. Father, thank you for the Good news of the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Please forgive us when we think like the world and treat you and your gospel with contempt. Please be merciful and turn our eyes to Christ crucified, a stumbling block for the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks, but to us, who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. It’s in his name that we pray, Amen.”