I started reading 1 Corinthians today. It looks like most of chap 1 is one two things: division and you being nothing. God chose the foolish to shame the strong, that doesn’t mean you’re strong now!
God is still using you in your foolishness! He is still using you in your weakness and nothingness.
If anything, now that you have accepted the Gospel of Christ, you are less now in the world than you ever were before.
So since you are so little and weak and tiny in the eyes of the world, why try to boost yourself up and say “Apollos baptized me!” and all this other team-making? Why would they make teams except to try to make one better than another? That’s why he gets into boasting. No one can boast before God. How silly it would be to come before God and brag about who discipled you or who baptized you or who you went to church with.
OK, so…
on this whole theme of freedom, why boast to anyone else that is weak and nothing down here about any of that stuff? Why not glory in your weakness and how God has filled in your gaps?
v. 26: Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.
God didn’t pick these people so that they could then go on and rise to success and be the poster child for God’s Great Infomercial. God chose the weak to shame the strong, but it doesn’t say anything about the weak taking over the strong people’s positions or having some kind of revenge and lording it over them. I guess I thought that for a long time about the foolish shaming the wise and the weak shaming the strong.
The Gospel is transfomational, in that it changes us, but not necessarily in the eyes of this wicked world.