So it was, brethren, that when I came to you and preached Christ’s message to you, I did so without any high pretensions to eloquence, or to philosophy.

I had no thought of bringing you any other knowledge than that of Jesus Christ, and of him as crucified.

It was with distrust of myself, full of anxious fear, that I approached you;✻

my preaching, my message depended on no persuasive language, devised by human wisdom, but rather on the proof I gave you of spiritual power;

God’s power, not man’s wisdom, was to be the foundation of your faith.

There is, to be sure, a wisdom which we make known among those who are fully grounded; but it is not the wisdom of this world, or of this world’s rulers, whose power is to be abrogated.

What we make known is the wisdom of God, his secret, kept hidden till now; so, before the ages, God had decreed, reserving glory for us.

(None of the rulers of this world could read his secret, or they would not have crucified him to whom all glory belongs.)

So we read of, Things no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no human heart conceived, the welcome God has prepared for those who love him.✻

To us, then, God has made a revelation of it through his Spirit; there is no depth in God’s nature so deep that the Spirit cannot find it out.

Who else can know a man’s thoughts, except the man’s own spirit that is within him? So no one else can know God’s thoughts, but the Spirit of God.

And what we have received is no spirit of worldly wisdom; it is the Spirit that comes from God, to make us understand God’s gifts to us;

gifts which we make known, not in such words as human wisdom teaches, but in words taught us by the Spirit, matching what is spiritual with what is spiritual.✻

Mere man with his natural gifts cannot take in the thoughts of God’s Spirit; they seem mere folly to him, and he cannot grasp them, because they demand a scrutiny which is spiritual.

Whereas the man who has spiritual gifts can scrutinize everything, without being subject, himself, to any other man’s scrutiny.✻

Who has entered into the mind of the Lord, so as to be able to instruct him? And Christ’s mind is ours.✻