Thought for 26th December 2021 at 11:00 “Determined to know Jesus" 1 Corinthians 2: 1 – 5
It was 07:00 on Monday the 6th of December and I was finally getting around to writing the piece for Januarys Hurst Green News.
I had planned to write the article on previous Friday but it turned into one of those days where I struggled to get work done and simple tasks become difficult and time-consuming burdens. So I resolved to get up early on Saturday before Gillian, she doesn’t approve of me working on Saturdays, to write the piece. We had planned to have a quiet family weekend of cleaning the house and putting up the Christmas decorations together. However, that was not to be! Saturday turned into a day of phone calls, people arriving on the doorstep and a plethora of small and annoying jobs that needed to be done. Needless to say in the busyness of the day I forgot all about the article. So I resolved I would write the article on Sunday afternoon after our time of worship. However I was forgetting the Trustees meeting we had scheduled for that Sunday afternoon. With the busyness of Sunday worship, phone calls and the Trustees meeting again the article was forgotten. That was until the early hours of Monday morning when I woke and I realised that again, I had failed to write the article.
As I lay awake thinking about what I had not done I realised my failed attempts to write the article was like those New Year resolutions we will all probably be making in five days’ time. New Year resolutions are important in that they have value, they may matter to other people and they could even change your life. Yet the pressures and demands of life will almost certainly mean that those resolutions will become guilty memories not long after they have been made with all sincerity. Studies show that only 8% of those who make a New Year's resolution actually keep them all year and 80% have already failed by the start of February.
So, in the early hours of Monday morning I decided to make a slightly early New Year resolution of my own, that I wouldn’t make any New Year resolutions this year. Instead I decided to do what Paul did when faced with all the demands, difficulties and busyness of dealing with the broken group of believers in Corinth, “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
So what did Paul mean? In the previous verse, Paul reminded the Corinthians that when he first came to their town, he did not present the gospel to them with lofty speech or human wisdom. In other words, he did not call attention to himself by performing feats of verbal gymnastics as some entertainers of his day did. He did not wow them with a display of his great personal wisdom. Orators of that era were much like entertainers—and Paul did not want to confuse the compelling truth of the gospel with mere entertainment.
No, Paul made a conscious choice not to display his knowledge about anything at all except for Jesus Christ and His crucifixion. It is not that Paul did not know about anything else, he was well educated and experienced. Paul simply wanted to be sure that the Corinthians weren't attracted by spectacle or entertainment. His mission was not to impress them with all he knew and could talk about. Paul decided to focus on a simple mission: to preach Jesus to them.
Like Paul in the busyness of his life I resolved to “know Jesus” that is preach Jesus simply and straightforwardly. Now you may think that I am talking about when I bore you for fifteen minutes each Sunday morning. However I was really thinking about how I preached Jesus in the busyness of living my life. I asked myself did Gillian and Lucas see Jesus in my reactions to the busyness of life or did they see an old grumpy snarling Ogre. Did my fellow motorist see Jesus when yet another person pulled out in front of me or did they see another driver filled with rage? I realised the answer is no, people rarely see Jesus as I live my life.
I realised that the busyness and demands of life are not going to go away so I resolved that in my busyness to, by my actions, preach Jesus to those around me.
Following Jesus comes with great reward and blessings, it also come with an obligation to share God’s offer of grace, that is preach Jesus to those around us. The most effective way to share the offer of grace is to live your life as Jesus lived His. Paul picks up on this idea later in his letter 1 Corinthians 11: 1 “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” Each of us who profess Jesus as Lord and Saviour have a responsibility to preach Jesus to all those around us, we just don’t necessarily need to use words. Perhaps Pauls words from his second letter to the Church in Corinth will make it clear, 2 Corinthians 3: “You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”
As a wise man once said, “The bests sermons are lived, not preached.”
I invite you as a new year approaches to resolve to know Jesus and Him crucified in your lives and thus share God’s offer of grace to those around you.