Hope Blog

▶ 1:08:05

Wes came to the mic, realized the slide behind him wanted a sermon title he had never submitted, and made one up on the spot from the last sentence of his notes: your wisdom is dumb. Then he started his stopwatch, took a drink of water, and opened to 1 Corinthians 1.

A second-century problem with a first-century answer

▶ 1:09:19

Before Corinth, Wes went to Irenaeus — one generation removed from the apostles, his own teacher having known some of them personally, and facing gnosticism. The gnostics married Greek philosophy to Christian language: thought and knowledge are the highest things, and the physical body we happen to inhabit is gross and evil. The load-bearing consequence was a denial of the real humanity of Christ, since perfect God-in-flesh was unthinkable if flesh itself is contemptible. Irenaeus answered with Against Heresies, which Wes described with some affection as a slog — “it’s got some good pieces, but most of the time you’re gonna be like, what is this guy talking about.”

What made gnosticism dangerous is what makes it recognizable. It arose when the surrounding culture saw something true in Christianity, liked what it already believed, and tried to blend the two. Irenaeus had a head start, because Paul had addressed the same instinct fifty or sixty years earlier.

The one thing Paul refused to do

▶ 1:11:52

Paul showed up without the five-syllable words. Corinth already had a factional problem — I follow Paul, I follow Apollos, I follow Christ — precisely because a congregation that latches onto powerful personalities will keep doing it. Wes read Paul as willing to go further still: “if I could have said it even simpler, to where you didn’t respect me even more, to where you had to focus on Christ and not me, I’m sure Paul would have made that trade.”

Two questions came out of the text and framed the rest of the message. Why is the cross folly to the perishing — wouldn’t it have been better if God had made it obviously wise, so that thoughtful people reasoned their way to Christ? And the modern version: why send Jesus then, instead of now, with phones and journalism and an audience of billions rather than a crowd of a thousand? Wes did not wave these off. “These are questions that people will ask, and they’re good questions.”

God flips the script, on purpose

▶ 1:15:51

Jesus did not go hunting for Pharisees; the Pharisees came looking for him. He sought out the weak and the poor. And Paul, arriving in a new city, was not heading for the amphitheater where the enlightened sat around having meaningful conversations — he went where the message would land.

▶ 1:19:36

Here Wes turned the passage on the room, and he was careful about it. Nobody walks into Hope Chapel and sees a congregation of ragtag good-for-nothings; by worldly standards this is a respectable crowd. That is not a compliment to rest on, because the gospel has more traction with people who have not already decided they have it figured out — the low in spirit as much as the low in standing.

The pattern runs the length of the Bible. Israel gets Saul, the tallest and most handsome man in the country, the perfect king by every visible measure — and then God gives them a shepherd boy barely out of adolescence. Jacob should have served Esau; God reversed it. This was not a family quirk. It was a public violation of what everyone knew to be sensible.

Which, Wes pointed out, is the best possible news for us, because human wisdom does not spend itself saving enemies. Do that in ordinary life and people ask if you are safe. The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and this is what it looks like.

Weakness, fear, and much trembling

▶ 1:23:00

Wes’s picture for the opposite of this was the college freshman home after one semester of intro philosophy, every sentence loaded with words nobody can define without a dictionary open. Most of them grow out of it. Paul never went in for it in the first place.

▶ 1:25:07

He said this as someone who loves the alternative. He likes apologetics — the Greek behind a word, how one passage bears on another, the arguments for Christ. He used to believe he needed the full arsenal before opening his mouth: anticipate the objection, research the specialty, be immaculate, hand over the two-hundred-page book. He has never once seen a person hand over a list of fifty objections, receive fifty answers, and convert.

So the advice is narrower than it sounds. When a question comes that you cannot answer, say I don’t know, I’ll try to find out, let’s keep talking — rather than improvising something half-remembered on the spot, which was his own habit. Proclaim what you do know: that Christ lived, died, and rose for the salvation of those who believe. That is the part with power in it.

▶ 1:30:17

His actual claim about apologetics is that it is aimed at the wrong audience. “Apologetics is not most helpful to the person you’re talking to. Apologetics and these good arguments are most helpful for the church body.” It is a comfort to know that whatever objection the world raises, good answers exist — even the ones you have not learned yet. Knowing facts about Christ serves knowing Christ; it is worth something insofar as it makes you bold.

He set two ministries side by side. One person spends fifty years memorizing the Bible and rehearsing arguments with friends, finally goes out at eighty, speaks to one person, and dies a week later. Another comes to faith, decides this is worth telling people, and does that for sixty years to hundreds. The second did more, and did not wait to become an expert first. “Matt is not the only person at Hope Chapel that is allowed to go talk to other people to try to win them for Christ.”

He did not want that mistaken for a case against study, and anchored the balance in Peter:

Gentleness gets easier with age, he admitted — it is hard to be gentle and respectful when you are young, zealous, and certain someone is wrong. Make the best defense you can, keep improving it, and do not let its imperfection stop the work.

Answering the question, by refusing it

▶ 1:35:59

Back to the opening question — and Wes’s answer was that it is the wrong question. God did not sit in eternity deciding to make the cross as confusing as possible so that as few people as possible would understand. Paul says there is wisdom here, taught by the Spirit, and that the person who has the Spirit finds the cross coherent — not a logical embarrassment to be swallowed on trust. It is unintelligible to those without the Spirit because of what their hearts have done, not what God has done.

▶ 1:38:24

The root of it is pride, and Wes defined pride precisely: not thinking well of yourself, but thinking more of yourself than is true. When the world’s top-ranked tennis player says he is the best in the world, that is a fact, not a boast. Satan’s rebellion was the guardian of God’s glory concluding the glory was his. The temptation in the garden was to be like God, knowing good and evil. Humanity’s version now is the confidence that we do not need saving, or that we can manage it ourselves with the right governments and the right incentives, and build a utopia because we are smart.

▶ 1:40:39

That is also the answer to the second question. The people specifically instructed to watch for the Messiah saw him in the flesh and said not ours — they had built a Messiah they preferred. If Jesus came today the miracles would be dismissed as CGI and the sayings as deepfakes; people who watched him break the laws of nature in person concluded he was working with the devil. Wes thought it took real arrogance to assume we would do better. Then the rich man in Luke 16, begging for someone to be sent back to warn his family, and told: they have Moses and the Prophets — if they will not hear them, they will not be convinced if someone rises from the dead.

Wes drew the pastoral consequence immediately. If none of us got here on merit, then the response to a person living a life we would not choose is not look at those sinful people. It is: God can save them too, because he saved me.

Which way is the pressure running?

▶ 1:45:11

Back to Irenaeus one last time. Nothing would have been easier than keeping the peace — the gnostics are Christians too, more or less, there is some wisdom there, hand the visiting teacher the podium. Wes was quick to say that peacekeeping is often right: the church is far too good at finding one point of difference and founding a denomination over it.

But there is a line, and he named the test rather than the issues. Sexual ethics is the easy example, and he deliberately passed over it. The harder ones are the sins we have quietly stopped counting — how we treat our elders, gluttony, extravagance, what we tell ourselves about wealth. So when you read something in scripture and think that was just cultural, stop and ask which it is: do you actually believe the text is making a cultural comment, or would obeying it change how you live in a way you would rather avoid? He was candid that the error runs both ways — nobody in the room is arguing for the shellfish laws — but the traffic in his generation runs mostly one direction, with the culture editing Christ instead of Christ addressing the culture. As he put it, Jesus in America would have said exactly the same things; he would just have talked about Lamborghinis instead of donkeys.

So be bold

▶ 1:50:18

The close was an encouragement, and it circled back to Paul in weakness and trembling. You do not need to be smart. You do not need the right answers. In some cases a fumbled, half-formed argument is the better instrument, because when the person comes to Christ anyway nobody is confused about whose power did it — Wes said part of him had wanted to preach badly on purpose for exactly that reason.

And to anyone who heard Paul’s “not many of you were wise” and thought that is me, everyone here has it together and I don’t: far more people in the room are thinking that than you imagine, and Paul says that position is an advantage. The person who believes he is the least likely candidate does not respond to a fruitful day by concluding God is lucky to have him. He says God worked through me in spite of me.

If it did not resonate — if you have a healthy sense of your own worth and Paul’s line slid past — Wes suggested it should land anyway. Measured against Christ, we are not on the same scale; there is no unit that makes the comparison work. All of us are low. He ended by praying over a congregation he called “this group of misfits, this group of lowly people who are empowered by the truth and the grace that you have given us,” and asking that for anyone looking for a way to be useful, God would make it plain and simple enough that there was no confusion about where to start.

▶ 1:08:09

Matt opened by admitting that most of us have heard plenty of unity messages,
particularly between 2016 and 2020, and that a certain amount of boredom was permitted. What he
wanted to add was the part those messages usually leave out — the places where Paul, the great
apostle of one mind, tells churches to separate on purpose.

1. The contradiction, laid out first

▶ 1:08:49

In the same letter, four chapters later, Paul reminds Corinth of an earlier note telling them
not
to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother and is sexually immoral, or greedy, or an
idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard — not even to eat with him. Elders who persist in sin are
to be rebuked in front of everyone
(1 Timothy 5:20).
Those who ignore the letter are to be noted and avoided
(2 Thessalonians 3:14–15).
None of these, Matt observed, is anybody’s life verse or throw-pillow text.

Which raises the question the whole message hangs on: isn’t having nothing to do with someone a
divisive act — and if so, are you now going to warn yourself? Since Paul clearly holds both, the
divergence has to be in what unity actually is.

2. The quarrel at Corinth

▶ 1:12:03

Matt was careful about what is and is not the problem. Having a favourite teacher is not the
issue — if you listen to one preacher constantly, fine. The issue is quarrelling in factions around
teachers. Nor is “the same mind” an instruction to become the Borg on all things; it stands in
opposition to faction-based quarrelling. And Paul’s first answer is not a management technique. It
is a question about Christ: our unity comes from a unified Lord, not from being in the same room or
wearing the same label.

3. Why eloquence is a liability

▶ 1:15:33

Paul is relieved he baptised almost nobody, so that no one could claim his name, and says Christ
sent him to preach the gospel
“not with
words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” Matt passed along a
line from a Baptist pastor that has stuck with him: “If you attract people through carnal means,
you may end up having to keep them through carnal means.” Fancy words can also be a blunt
instrument — did you hear the Greek I just used, therefore submit — or they can quietly
shift the draw from the cross to wise sayings. “Which is another reason we don’t do Christian TED
talks.” The remedy for disunity is not to work slowly toward the cross; it is to start there.

4. Servants, not wizards

▶ 1:20:13

By chapter three Paul is blunter still: while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you
not of the
flesh and behaving only in a human way? Matt lingered on that phrase. Behaving in a merely
human way is what you would expect of humans — so the alternative cannot be human strength applied
harder. It is a grace, a mystical union with Christ.

Jesus used the same picture — the
man who scatters seed, sleeps and rises, and the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how. Your
belonging to the body of Christ is an act of God, not an act of Paul.

▶ 1:23:07

Matt took what he called a bunny trail off that, and it was one of the warmest turns in the
message. If Paul and Apollos were not wizards, then neither do you have to feel like one. We look
at someone we would like to reach and decide they are not ready — “well, of course they’re not
ready. But what message enables the heart to receive the very message? It is the gospel.” Good soil
looks like dirt. It does not take wizardry, and it does not take eloquence; the point is not to do
a deliberately poor job to feel spiritual, but to stop waiting for a qualification that was never
required.

5. One foundation, and a fire that tells the truth

▶ 1:25:06

Here Matt slowed down and said it twice deliberately, because the two versions sound almost
identical. The foundation is not Jesus the idea, or a Jesus vibe, or a lifestyle that is Jesus-like
— he is not the Buddha. If Christianity boils down to behaving as he behaved, then it reduces to
imitation, and works slip back in through the side door: the main point is to be like him, it’s
annoying that you’re still not, try again. Jesus did things you will never do, such as being
the Jewish Messiah and giving his life as a ransom for many. Being Jesus-ish and being in Jesus are
not the same religion.

▶ 1:27:55

What is built on that foundation gets tested by fire
(1 Corinthians 3:12–17).
Things that look strong may not be; things that look strange may turn out to be true works of God.
And when Paul warns that God will destroy anyone who destroys God’s temple, he is not talking about
masonry in Jerusalem. He is saying that if you wreak havoc among God’s people, God defends what is
his. Matt paused on the word holy there: holiness is not the same as purity. Holy means
separated for, belonging to, possessing God’s own presence. Sanctification is growth in holy
decisions — but in the strict sense you cannot get holier than having the Spirit of God live in
you.

6. All things are yours

▶ 1:30:49

Any parent has ended a fight over toys by announcing that the toys were never theirs to begin
with: they’re mine, go to your rooms. Matt pointed out that Paul does the opposite. He does not say
nothing belongs to you. He says stop boasting over people, because all of it belongs to
you — the kingdom, its treasure, grace, fullness of joy — and you are tearing down God’s temple over
scraps while the whole feast is yours. Then it gets better:
the Lord’s
portion is his people, and
the Lord is our chosen
portion and our cup. We inherit one another. It will take a miracle for us to believe it.

7. Mr One Mind, causing a scene

▶ 1:35:45

Then the example. Men came down from Judea teaching that
unless you are
circumcised according to the custom of Moses you cannot be saved, and Luke records that Paul and
Barnabas had “no small dissension and debate” with them. Matt translated: Paul made a scene, big
time. Imagine converting to Islam in Texas and then having fluent Arabic speakers from Saudi Arabia
arrive to teach you how to be a real Muslim — the intimidation lands instantly, and it sounds
legitimate. Paul is not going to let go because someone asked nicely.

▶ 1:38:23

Matt drew out how alone that left Paul. Barnabas had been beside him in Acts 15 and now was not.
These were big names — Peter, men from James. The pressure was real, and the pragmatic case was
strong: Judaism was the underdog in the Greco-Roman world and infant Christianity was the underdog
of underdogs, no emperors, no elites,
not many wise
by worldly standards, scraping together bread for widows. A few key allies would not have hurt.
Paul could have let it go.

▶ 1:41:39

Instead: “You
were running well. Who hindered you? … A little leaven leavens the whole lump.” That persuasion,
Paul says, does not come from the one who calls you. And it would have cost him nothing but gain to
concede — his own persecution would have stopped.

8. Why it is worth the fight

▶ 1:43:58

So the two halves resolve. “Unity, after all, isn’t coming together so as to be together,” Matt
said. “It is coming to the one and only gospel there is, the one and only foundation there can be,
the person of Jesus Christ, empty-handed.” Separating from a divisive person is a separation for
unity’s sake, because a fake Jesus saves nobody and there is no unity to be had with him — however
good the numbers look or the room feels.

The reason, he said, is that we have no spiritual unity with one another directly. “I only have
unity with you if I’m in Christ and you’re in Christ.” It is indirect, and it runs through one
person. Which also means the test of any ministry is not its power. You could move mountains, cast
out devils, carry accurate prophetic words, know Greek and Hebrew and centuries of history, have
the accent and the following — and the fire tests one thing: the gospel you preached. Without that
foundation, Matt said, you may as well be a 1-800 psychic.

▶ 1:46:48

He closed by turning the knife toward the people who have been here longest. Twenty years in,
thirty years in, there is still no striving after his gifts, as if the cross got us most of the way
and we finish the job — having
begun by the Spirit, we are not perfected by the flesh. Charismatics have our own version of
smuggling it back in: forgiveness is free, but the Spirit is the platinum package, and there is a
deluxe tier above that. It creeps in most easily wherever Christianity has quietly become
being like Jesus, because that is a project that never ends and never arrives. Pursue
peace with everyone, he urged — “but with extreme prejudice, like a hostage negotiator.” Not
because we share a denomination, a culture, a political animal or a song, but because we are both
in the real Christ. There is no other place unity exists.

▶ 1:07:15

The service had opened with the Shema, and Matt’s message turned out to be about
the same thing from the other end: not what we owe God, but what he has already given. Before the
text he spent twenty minutes on why he was preaching it — and that stretch is not a preamble
either.

1. Phase two

▶ 1:07:51

Some months earlier, Matt said, God broke an addiction off him — compulsively scouring news
and Twitter for whoever had the inside scoop. He had wanted to stop, prayed to stop, and could
not; a prophetic word from a sister in Christ ended it. He wanted his free moments spent looking
at his children rather than his phone. The challenge he has been repeating to the congregation
since came out of that: open the areas where you have failed and wanted help and could not manage
it, and let God do something.

▶ 1:09:51

Phase two, in his case, was fasting. He described himself, without much competition, as the
worst faster of any pastor you have called — a friend once watched him at home and asked whether
he was simply eating constantly. The excuse was always training. He looked up the science,
half-expecting to find that skipping breakfast might kill him, and found the opposite: a
cardiologist explaining that the body consumes what serves it least, that inflammation drops, that
it is good for you. He got interested.

▶ 1:12:22

And then came the thought worth the whole story: this couldn’t be for the Lord if I’m
excited about it. “Of course, as you know,” he said, “the Lord’s not pleased unless I’m
miserable.” That was the hidden gem — not the fast, but the dark corner behind it where he had
quietly assumed God did not want good things for him. It is the small assumptions, he said, that
chain you down.

2. Reimagining spiritual warfare

▶ 1:15:33

Matt is glad the spiritual warfare movement reminded the church that Christian living has a
spiritual dimension. His worry is what happens at the fringe, where the cross becomes the penthouse
of your achievements instead of the ground floor — where you have to trace your ancestry to find
out whose great-uncle visited a lodge. Legions of demons come out at a word. They pose no threat to
him. Picking up what Brandon had said earlier in the service, Matt put the blood of Christ back
underneath everything: you can walk in freedom because you have already been set free.

“The most fruitful and the most sophisticated aspects of spiritual warfare are when we let God
wrestle ourselves,” he said — the fear, the unwillingness to forgive, the bitterness. Not foreign
entities you can spit at, but things we hold on to tightly because of the security they give us.
He would like us to reimagine spiritual warfare as God giving us treasure and taking our trash.
Hardly something to boast about.

3. The greeting is not filler

▶ 1:18:42

That is the bridge into 1 Corinthians. The opening is not churchy noise to get through on the
way to the good parts; the way Paul frames the letter is how he will handle every mess in it.
Paul is “called by the will of God to be an apostle” — not a type-A personality who volunteered
and climbed the religious ladder. Some readers find the New Testament too Pauline and want more
James or Peter. That, Matt said, is God’s doing, not Paul’s; it is what he hired him for. Paul
writes to the Galatians that if he or an angel from heaven preaches another gospel, let him be
accursed — brush off the angel. When a man that certain talks about the gospel, listen
closely.

▶ 1:20:16

And the gospel is not merely history. When Paul reminds them of it he says “Christ
died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” — the event and its significance
together. Which means you could memorize Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and still not know the
gospel, because the good news is not only what Jesus did but what it means for you in him. That is
also why Paul can speak of the day God judges secrets “according to my
gospel.”

4. Said to those people

▶ 1:21:51

This is the letter that deals with scandalous, nutty nonsense, and Paul has the nerve to call
them sanctified.

▶ 1:22:33

So Matt defined the word, because holiness does not mean purity. Picture a field of sheep and
one perfect specimen among them — no blemish, no injury, the best fluff. It is a pure sheep and it
is zero percent holy. What makes it holy is being given to the Lord, set apart for him. You could
hold a flawless replica of a Tabernacle instrument, unscratched gold, and it would not be holy,
because it is not being used in God’s presence for him. Holiness is about belonging.

Which changes the direction of the whole thing. We are not working toward a day when God might
finally arrive. “We are sanctified in Christ Jesus,” Matt said, “meaning his real presence is with
us because of the gospel, right now.” The instinct runs the other way — fix this, restore that
relationship, pray all night, and maybe qualify for a starter pack of the Spirit. But the Spirit
came upon believers as a person in his fullness, not in percentages, sanctifying tax collectors
and liars. So when we find ourselves in sin, he is the first one we go to, not the last.

5. Enriched, not earned

▶ 1:27:20

He is a proud father to a congregation that has gone off the reservation in serious ways, and
he keeps naming the source of what they have. Later in the letter you can hear them: I am very
spiritual, look at my prophecy, look what happens when I touch someone’s headache. As though there
were invisible scales in the sky and enough prayer points to reach the top shelf at Dave and
Buster’s. That is how man-made religion always sorts out — a ladder, and the quiet consolation of
being further up it than the people behind you, under a message that only ever says do
better.

6. Gifts confirm the message, not the man

▶ 1:29:02

The throwaway clause in verse 6 is the key: the testimony about Christ was confirmed among
you, said in the middle of talk about gifts of power. Paul says the same thing plainly to
them later, and again to Rome, where he will speak only of what Christ accomplished through him
by
word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders.

▶ 1:30:49

God’s strategy is to use the Spirit’s gifts to confirm the gospel, not to affirm anyone’s ego.
Which explains what Matt called the least instinctive move in the letter: to the very people
puffed up about their gifting, Paul does not order a few months in spiritual gift time-out. He
tells them to earnestly
desire prophecy. Our instinct, when people get wacky, is none of it for anybody for a couple
of years.

▶ 1:32:30

Two more things sit in verse 7. You are not lacking in any gift, because the Spirit has already
been given generously — yes, to the basic enlisted starter-pack Christians too, which can grate on
a person who has not missed a Sunday in decades. And Paul ties gift usage to waiting for the
revealing of Christ, because the gifts confirm a message that includes a risen Lord coming back
for his bride. Hence “let no
one boast in men… all things are yours, and you are Christ’s.” His divine power has
already granted us all things that pertain to life and godliness. Foundation, not
pinnacle.

7. Sustained to the end, guiltless

▶ 1:40:31

Not groveling and barely making it. Guiltless. Matt refused to decorate the line: “it’s in the
Bible, so don’t blame me.” This is why he says things that sound backwards — that we are saved not
because we gave our lives to him but because he gave his life for us, not because we turned over a
new chapter but because he emptied the grave. Faith matters enormously. But there will be seasons
when you look for your faith and cannot find it, and in those weeks it helps to remember that your
trust is not in your trust. It is in him being trustworthy. The Old Testament stories are not a
toolkit for succeeding where those men failed, as though the Spirit were a better set of tools for
the same human-centered project. The old self
was co-crucified with him — it cannot turn over a new leaf, because it is dead. The engine
behind the whole endeavor is Christ, which is exactly why he can sustain us to the end.

8. Fellowship is the goal

▶ 1:41:19

Called into fellowship. If God wanted staff, Matt pointed out, he already has plenty,
and by all appearances they are better at it — an angel in its glory looks like a competent
employee, whereas he cannot find his keys or remember why he walked into the room. Why is Song of
Solomon in the Bible? Fellowship is the goal, not a workforce. Yes, make disciples — but what kind?
Clock-inners who make more clock-inners is a fruitfulness he does not want, and he suspects God
sometimes withholds that kind of growth as a mercy. The old joke says if you want to get things
done you need Marthas; but if the to-do list says love, love,
love, then what you need are Marys.

▶ 1:44:30

“Our main task is to sit at his feet and adore him and to let him transform us with his love.
We
only love because he first loved us.” What if the deep satisfaction you are hoping is real is
exactly what he promises to give you for nothing — not a loan at low interest, not at zero
interest. The relationship is lopsided and always will be. He will always be better to you than
you are to him. What if that is fine with him.

▶ 1:48:11

All of which is how Paul goes on to rebuke this church, and he does rebuke it. To the factions
fighting over a slice of pie: all of Christ has been given to you. To the sexual chaos of people
looking for connection: you are not independent, you belong more truly than you know. To the
lawsuits over what I deserve: your cup overflows. To the arguments about what we are free to eat,
driven by a fear of being controlled: the only real freedom is in him. And to anyone still
treading water while eyeing someone else’s giftings — “let me tell you how spiritual you are:
because of the fellowship the Father has with the Son, you are accepted.” Christ is already risen,
already building his church, and always
interceding for people whose prayer life could use some work.