I came with nothing but the Christ crucified
1When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come with lofty speech or wisdom as I announced to you the mystery of God. 2For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 3I came to you weak, afraid, and trembling, 4and my speech and my preaching had no persuasive words of wisdom in them, only the proof that the Spirit and power give, 5so that your faith would not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God.
The wisdom God kept hidden
6Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are on their way out. 7We speak the wisdom of God, hidden in a mystery, which God marked out before the ages for our glory. 8None of the rulers of this age understood it; had they understood, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9But as it is written: “What no eye has seen and no ear has heard, what has never risen into the human heart, is what God has prepared for those who love him.” 10To us God revealed it through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11Who knows what is in a person except that person’s own spirit within? In the same way, no one has known what is in God except the Spirit of God. 12And we have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who comes from God, so that we may know what God has freely given us. 13This is what we speak, not in words taught by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, matching spiritual things to the spiritual. 14The natural person does not accept what comes from the Spirit of God: it is folly to him, and he cannot understand it, because it is discerned spiritually. 15The spiritual person discerns everything and is himself subject to no one’s judgment. 16For “who has known the mind of the Lord, that he should instruct him?” But we have the mind of the Christ.
