25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
This is a message and a sermon that somewhere, somehow I would be flat-out excited to preach and teach! It rings so clear and close to the heart of God that there are chills up and down my back as I think of the messages of God to men of very low estate.
Do you remember the cheers and waves of righteous indignation at concerts as Garth Brookes belted out, "I've got friends in low places?" Do you recall the raucous roar as the common people sang at the top of their lungs; speaking the truth of their estate to power? There was the sense that the common people far outnumbered the rich and sophisticated?
The telegraphed juxtaposition of picturing a low-brow cowboy crashing into his ex-wife's sophisticated high-brow wealthy wedding party with an utter disrespect for her and her new lover is deliciously dripping with a sense of what she lost in him. And this is not to say that as Christians we are to be disrespectful of people, but to demons? YOU BETCHA! Now—take this into the realm of what God started in Jesus two thousand years ago!
Jesus is constantly aiming low ...
The US Air Force might be aiming high, but Jesus is aiming low into the trenches of a demon infested world looking for a soul to save. Yeah—the devil may have gone down to Georgia looking for a soul to steal, but Jesus came to Georgia looking for low-brow idiot and moron like me and others to prove that it is His power that saves and not the gods, not flesh, and not the lusts or passions thereof! It is Him and Him alone and he doesn't choose many mighty, smart, wealthy, powerful, and influential. The huddled masses are the ones He dips into as He scrapes the very bottom of the world looking for those who already understand who and what they are in the world's estimations of them.
This is the vision I grew up on and am now being reminded of. We were excited that God would choose us—the no-names, the nothings, the ignored, and the overlooked. We were the ones voted least likely to be anything at all. We were the nerds and wall-flowers. So, when we opened scripture and saw Jesus choosing dirty smelly fishermen, tax collectors, and prostitutes—we felt it. The Lord's reaching in and down to them instantly connected with Him reaching in and down to us. We knew what it was like to be the rejected, bullied, mocked, and shunned.
That the Lord would call us to become respectable, loving, caring, giving, and sacrificial did not mean we started there. And remembering the pit from which the Lord dug us always served (and still does) to remind us to never look down on those like ourselves as we went out into the world to save and rescue our brothers and sisters in this demon infested world! It allowed us to get smelly and dirty and as Neil Cole writes—having church in the smoking section as we reached out.
The progress of Paul ...
In 1 Corinthians 15:9 “For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.”
In Ephesians 3:8 “Though I am less than the least of all the Lord’s people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ.”
In 1 Timothy 1:15 “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.”
The more Paul lived as a servant and disciple of Christ Jesus, the more he got in contact with how he stacked up. Right from the start, he threw his Jewish Hebrew status over the rails and deep-sixed it. Yet, as time and ministry went on, he became increasingly aware of his own status in humanity and that the elevator had but a single direction: down. The up button was broken, disconnected, and non-functional! And here is just how bad it got:
10 We are fools (móros) for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are honored, we are dishonored!
Somewhere along the line, Paul and others with him knew the truth. That they would gladly take up the the lowest position in the earthly expression of the Kingdom of God and become the fools (morons) who were stupid enough to serve everyone else at their own personal loss in Christ. They would lose their resources, their time, their reputations, and their lives so that others could hear and know the story and salvation of the crucified and resurrected and ascended and returning Jesus Christ!
Consider what Paul writes providentially by the Spirit of God in him:
26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish (morons) in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30 And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
Most of you reading this (like me writing it) were not chosen because of how smart the world thinks you are. You were chosen because you are at the bottom in almost every way. In the world, you had no future of being something special. You were not going to be the one who made it to fame and fortune. In all honesty, we were the dullest bricks in the box. As for myself, I am so stupid, hard-headed, and dull that it took God forty years to break my thick skull to get this idiot brain of mine to register His purpose and gain my loyalty and willingness to die to my own selfish desires, passions, and lusts!
Personally—I was the smart kid called stupid. I can still see and hear my own father berating me in his own confusion. I wasted my high school years. All of my short 17 years of living had been filled with, "He's a smart kid. I don't understand why he doesn't do better!" And at literally the final hours before high school ended, my hopes of graduating were evaporating before my eyes and those of my parents, teachers, and friends. Hence—my father's words: "Larry, you're just flat not going to graduate. You've blown it!" The message of my failure from my honest father cut me in half. Yet, in the closing hours, I rose up and in the end, I made it.
What I didn't know is how this would play out in my Christian life as well. All of my forty years since I first walked into the dingy ugly store-front church called Grace Chapel, people have told me: Larry, you've got such potential in the Lord. Their hopes were high, but my hard-headed thick-skulled idiot brain could not sort it all out and I nearly destroyed myself in sin along the way. And so it is telling to me that the story of my brief existence on this planet is that somehow God saw the phoenix in me would rise in Him from the ashes of my own stupidity. The truth would set this moron free. I am most assuredly a moron for Christ!
This is precisely what it might mean for many of us to be in Christ. We might have to be the ones who scrape our face down the sidewalk for years and even decades. Why? Because God is constantly bringing us back, calling, wooing, working, and laboring until Christ is formed in us in spite of our thick skulls and dull-witted minds. And why does He do it? Why doesn't He just give up?
6 And he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. 7 And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?’ 8 And he answered him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. 9 Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”
This is me at forty years into this gospel thing and God is still piling manure on me. Do you know what it is like to live in a pile of crap as the Lord patiently waits for you to wake up? Some of you do! Some of you know exactly what I am writing about. You feel it. You know it! And yet—here we are.
As much as I can lament this sorry state, I must write it here for you: I would rather be the stupidest, dullest, half-wit in the Kingdom of God than the wisest, smartest, richest, and most influential man in the world—any day of the week in this life!
And now I wonder: Are you like me? A moron for Christ? As low as I am, I have to believe that if you are still reading these words that you are better, higher, smarter, and more together than I have ever been or perhaps ever will be! Yet, most of us are still the bottom of the barrel of the world. Isn't it amazing that God has chosen us and that we, by His power and grace, will rule with him, even judging angels? Wow—all I can say is wow!