Operating System
1 Corinthians 2:1–16
Recommended Reading: Proverbs 1:1–7; 2:1–22; 4:1–27
Do you stay up on New Year’s Eve to wait for the clock to strike midnight?
If you do, you probably don’t care that much about when the New Year
begins in places like Fiji or Auckland, New Zealand. However, you
probably cared a bit more on December 31, 1999, as TV cameras captured
the stroke of midnight in those locations to see whether the world had avoided the Y2K disaster. As clocks struck 12:00, 12:01, 12:02
in each time zone around the world, we all breathed a collective sigh
of relief that televisions still functioned, nuclear power plants hadn’t
failed and cars continued running.
Remember the
craziness that preceded Y2K? Companies and governments spent billions of
dollars to hire software programmers to pore over and correct millions
of lines of computer code. All because of a looming catastrophe if
computers were to misread the last two zeroes in the year 2000 as 1900.
Ironically,
most of us have zero understanding of computer code. The apostle Paul
said that wisdom is much the same way. Unless we have the Holy Spirit to
help us know the language of God’s wisdom, we won’t really understand
it. “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come
from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot
understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:14).
People
who don’t have the Holy Spirit dwelling within them quite naturally
struggle to grasp spiritual wisdom—God’s Word, his desires, his
character, his values. In fact, God’s wisdom often seems foolish to
non-Christians. It’s like a foreign language to them. But when people
trust in Christ as Savior, God sends the Holy Spirit to dwell within
them (see John 14:16–17). They can begin learning God’s wisdom while the Holy Spirit helps them understand it.
If
we believe that true wisdom comes only from God, where should we turn
when we seek wisdom? Paul provides the answer: “’What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived—the things
God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has
revealed to us by his Spirit’” (1 Corinthians 2:9–10).
In the Bible God speaks the language that drives us—our spiritual
operating system. If we want to know God’s wisdom so that we can process
the joys and trials of everyday living, we need to turn often to God’s
Word and ask the Spirit to help us understand it.
To Take Away