Feb 3, 2020

Join us as we explore God’s ancient wisdom and apply it to our modern lives. His word is as current and relevant today as it was when he inspired its authors more than two and a half millennia ago. The websites where you can reach us are alittlewalkwithgod.com, richardagee.com, or saf.church.

I hope you will join us every week and be sure to let us know how you enjoy the podcast and let others know about it, too. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for joining me today for "A Little Walk with God." I'm your host Richard Agee.

Some things just don't make sense. Why do most animals in a herd point the same direction in a field? Why do penguins live only in the coldest climate on earth? Why do most whales, the largest animals in the ocean, eat only the plankton, the smallest of sea life? Why is an octopus considered one of the smartest of sea creatures, incredibly ugly, and seldom seen in the wild? Why do some areas of the world get torrential rains while others get only a few inches of rain over decades?

We sometimes call them imponderables, things that have no concrete answers. Science is uncovering some logical responses, but still, we are baffled by the mysteries of the world and the whys that surround us every day. We have learned more in the last 100 years than in the rest of man's history, but we still have many unanswered questions about the world in which we live.

We think we're pretty smart today since we know a lot about quantum physics and how things stay together. We've learned about the universe and the fact we are not the center or even near the center of one of several billion galaxies. Our Milky Way seemed so large until we began to compare it to more enormous galaxies around us. We thought we understood the weather until we found we really don't, and our weather folks still get it right about two-thirds of the time. Yep, we think we are wise today with the trillions of words housed in the Library of Congress on floating around on the Internet.

Paul got it right, though, when he wrote his first letter to the members of the church at Colossae in the first century.

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart."

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 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, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, "Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord."

Everyone around him thought they were wise, but compared with God's wisdom, we are pretty foolish. We don't know much of anything. Scientists will tell you the more we know, the more we figure out we don't know. But God is the creator of all things. He knows it all. He's the one who made all the rules we are just on the edge of trying to figure out. In the 1970s, we sent two experimental crafts called Voyager, to explore the outer edge of our solar system. Forty years later, they found out all our assumptions about the border of our solar system were wrong. Now those two satellites are still headed where no one has gone before but have barely scratched the surface of real space travel.

Our brilliance turns into ignorance when we see all that is out there beyond the confines of our puny planet. Our greatest wisdom appears as foolishness compared to God's understanding. And what does Paul use as his comparison? The cross.

How can we explain why God would do such a thing? We can't, except that he loves us more than we can ever understand. We disobey him, but he loves us. We run from him, but he loves us. We curse him and do everything he asks us not to do, yet he loves us enough to wrap himself in human flesh and live among us to show us just how much he loves us.

He died the most horrible death imaginable, crucifixion at the hands of Roman soldiers, after an unjust kangaroo trial. He never did anything to justify the suffering he endured, but he took it, all the same, to show us how much he loves us. Jesus taught radical lessons that said follow a pattern set by a heart filled with love instead of the rules given to the prophets and priests. He said to do two things, and you'll be in good stead with the creator. Love God and love others.

He never said it would be easy to follow those two rules, but that's a straightforward list to remember. It's sure a lot easier than remembering the laundry list of dos and don'ts most organized religions give us to follow. Just love.

Paul tells us what that looks like, and again, it doesn't make sense to us. It looks like the cross. Be ready to be hated by the world. Be ready to be misunderstood. Be ready to suffer when you share the good news of what God has done to redeem us from the deceiver who wants to capture our soul. It sounds crazy to those who have not given themselves to him. But for those who have, for those who know his forgiveness, the cross is the answer. The empty tomb is proof.

Are you ready to let go of the wisdom of the world and accept the wisdom of the one who created all things? It takes faith. It costs everything. God never accepts second place in your life. He wants everything you have and everything you are at his immediate disposal. But God never makes mistakes. He knows how best to bring you safely home. All you need to do is believe and follow him. It's a good day to start.  

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn't, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day.

Scriptures marked NIV are taken from the NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (NIV): Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™. Used by permission of Zondervan