BibleWare/BibWare.bin/bibtrans/weymouth.exe/1CO.WNT

Text File | 1993-06-07 | 63KB | 1,209 lines

1:1 Paul, called to be an Apostle of /1 Christ Jesus through the
 will of God--and our brother Sosthenes:
1:2 To the Church of God in Corinth, men and women /2
 consecrated in Christ Jesus, called /3 to be /4 saints, with
 all in every place who call on the name of our Lord Jesus
 Christ-- /5 their Lord as well as ours.
1:3 May grace and peace be granted to you from God our Father
 and the Lord Jesus Christ.
1:4 I thank my God continually on your behalf for the grace of
 God bestowed on you /6 in Christ Jesus--
1:5 that you have been /7 so richly blessed in Him, with
 readiness of speech and fulness of knowledge.
1:6 Thus my testimony as to the Christ has been confirmed in
 your experience,
1:7 so that there is no gift of God in which you /8 consciously
 come short while patiently waiting for the reappearing of our
 Lord Jesus Christ,
1:8 who will also keep you stedfast to the very End, so that you
 will be free from reproach on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
1:9 God is ever true to His promises, and it was by Him that you
 were, one and all, called /9 into fellowship with his Son Jesus
 Christ, our Lord.

1:10 Now I entreat you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus
 Christ, to /1 cultivate a spirit of harmony--all of you--and
 that there be no divisions among you, but rather a perfect
 union through your having one mind and one judgement.
1:11 For I have been distinctly informed, my brethren, about you
 by Chloe's people, that there are dissensions among you.
1:12 What I mean is that each of you is a partisan. One man says
 "I belong to Paul;" another "I belong to Apollos;" a third "I
 belong to /2 Peter;" a fourth "I belong to Christ."
1:13 Is the Christ /3 in fragments? Is it Paul who was crucified
 on your behalf? Or were you baptized /4 to be Paul's adherents?
1:14 I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except
 Crispus and Gaius--
1:15 for fear people should say that you were baptized /5 to be
 my adherents.
1:16 I did, however, baptize Stephanas' household also: but I do
 not think that I baptized any one else.
1:17 Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the Good
 News; and not in merely wise words--lest the Cross of Christ
 should be deprived of its power.
1:18 For /6 the Message of the Cross is /7 foolishness to those
 who are on the way to perdition, but it is the power of God to
 those whom He is saving.
1:19 For so it stands written, <"I will exhibit the nothingness
 of the wisdom of /8 the wise, and the intelligence of the
 intelligent I will bring to nought.">

1:20 Where is your wise man? Where your expounder of the Law?
 Where your investigator of the questions of this present age?
 Has not God shown the world's wisdom to be utter foolishness?
1:21 For after the world by its wisdom--as God in His wisdom had
 ordained--had failed to gain the knowledge of God, God was
 pleased, by the apparent foolishness of the Message which we
 preach, to save those who accepted it.
1:22 Seeing that Jews demand /1 miracles, and Greeks go in
 search of wisdom,
1:23 while we proclaim a Christ who has been crucified--to the
 Jews a stumbling-block, to Gentiles foolishness,
1:24 but to those who have received the Call, whether Jews or
 Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
1:25 Because that which the world deems foolish in God is wiser
 than men's wisdom, and that which it deems feeble in God is
 mightier than men's might.
1:26 For consider, brethren, God's call to you. /2 Not many who
 are wise with merely human wisdom, not many of position and
 influence, not many of noble birth have been called.
1:27 But God has chosen the things which the world regards as
 foolish, in order to put its wise men to shame; and God has
 chosen the things which the world regards as destitute of
 influence, in order to put its powerful things to shame;
1:28 and the things which the world regards as base, and those
 which it sets utterly at nought--things /3 that have no
 existence--God has chosen in order to reduce to nothing things
 that do exist;
1:29 to prevent any mortal man from boasting in the presence of
 God.
1:30 But you--and it is all God's doing--are in Christ Jesus: He
 has become for us a wisdom which is from God, consisting of
 righteousness and sanctification and /4 deliverance;
1:31 in order that it may be as Scripture says, <"He who
 boasts--let his boast be in the Lord.">
2:1 And as for myself, brethren, when I came to you, it was not
 with surpassing power of eloquence or earthly wisdom that I
 came, announcing to you /5 that which God had commanded me to
 bear witness to.

2:2 /1 For I determined to be utterly ignorant, when among you,
 of everything except of Jesus Christ, and of Him as having been
 crucified.
2:3 And so far as I myself was concerned, I came to you /2 in
 conscious feebleness and in fear and in deep anxiety.
2:4 And my language and the Message that I proclaimed were not
 adorned with persuasive words of earthly wisdom, but depended
 upon truths which the Spirit taught and mightily carried home;
2:5 so that your trust might rest not on the wisdom of man but
 on the power of God.
2:6 Yet when we are among mature believers we do speak words of
 wisdom; a wisdom not belonging, however, to the present age nor
 to the leaders of the present age who are soon to pass away.
2:7 But in dealing with truths hitherto kept secret we speak of
 God's wisdom--that hidden wisdom which, before the world began,
 God pre-destined, so that it should result in glory to us;
2:8 a wisdom which not one of the leaders of the present age /3
 possesses, for if they had /4 possessed it, they would never
 have crucified the Lord of glory.
2:9 But--to use the words of Scripture--we speak of <things
 which eye has not seen nor ear heard,> and which have never
 entered the heart of man: <all that God has in readiness for
 them that love Him.>
2:10 For us, however, God has drawn aside the veil through the
 teaching of the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything,
 including the depths of the divine nature.
2:11 For, among human beings, who knows a man's inner thoughts
 except the man's own spirit within him? In the same way, also,
 only God's Spirit is acquainted with God's inner thoughts.
2:12 But we have not received /5 the spirit of the world, but
 the Spirit which comes forth from God, that we may know the
 blessings that have been so freely given to us by God.
2:13 Of these we speak--not in language which man's wisdom
 teaches us, but in that which the Spirit teaches--adapting, as
 we do, spiritual words to spiritual /6 truths.

2:14 The /1 unspiritual man rejects the /2 things of the Spirit
 of God, and cannot attain to the knowledge of them, because
 they are spiritually judged.
2:15 But the spiritual man judges of everything, although he is
 himself judged by no one.
2:16 For <who has penetrated the mind of the Lord, and will
 instruct Him?> But *we* have the mind of Christ.
3:1 And as for myself, brethren, I found it impossible to speak
 to you as spiritual men. It had to be as to worldlings--mere
 babes in Christ.
3:2 /3 I fed you with milk and not with solid food, since for
 this you were not yet strong enough. And even now you are not
 strong enough:
3:3 you are still unspiritual. For /4 so long as jealousy and
 strife continue among you, can it be denied that you are
 unspiritual and are living and acting like mere men of the
 world?
3:4 For when some one says, "I belong to Paul," and another
 says, "I belong to Apollos," is not this the way men of the
 world speak?
3:5 What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? They are just God's
 servants, through whose efforts, and as the Lord granted power
 to each, you accepted the faith.
3:6 I planted and Apollos watered; but it was God who was, all
 the time, giving the increase.
3:7 So that neither the planter nor the waterer is of any
 importance. God who gives the increase is all in all.
3:8 Now in aim and purpose the planter and the waterer are one;
 and yet each will receive his own special reward, answer