And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. 2 For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. 4 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
6 We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 However, as it is written:
“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—
10 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. 14 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. 15 The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, 16 for,
“Who has known the mind of the Lord
so as to instruct him?”
But we have the mind of Christ.
-1 Corinthians 2:1-16
This passage highlights the importance of the Holy Spirit in our salvation and our transformation. The Holy Spirit is one of the three persons of the Trinity. In Christianity, we believe that God is one god but three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They are all God but they are three separate persons. I know, it’s confusing and a wonderful mystery. We’ll talk about how beautiful the Trinity actually is at a later devotional.
But just know now that the Holy Spirit is one of the persons of the Trinity. And His job is to change our hearts. This passage reminds us that our desire to seek God and to accept His salvation requires the help of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives us that desire and that yearning for God. Without the Holy Spirit, we would run away from God.
Knowing this should produce humility, gratitude, and grace within us. It produces humility because we know that our desire for Jesus didn’t even come from ourselves but from the Holy Spirit. It produces gratitude because we’re so happy and grateful that the Holy Spirit moved in our hearts so that we can know God. And lastly, it produces grace because it helps us to show mercy and grace toward those who don’t know God because we know we are no different from them were it not for the help of the Holy Spirit.
Does your faith embodies humility, gratitude, and grace?
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