What prejudices and insecurities we have brought into our relationship with Christ?

     For example, when the disciples started arguing who was going to be the greatest in the kingdom. . . they were bringing with them their definitions of success.

Jim Elliott wrote these words in his journal: "He is no fool who would choose to give the things he cannot keep to buy what he can never lose." In 1952, he and Nate Saint and some other young men, who were trying to reach the Auca Indians in Ecuador, were martyred. What he wrote as a very young man, many people live their entire lives without ever understanding.

It's important to remember that the apostle Paul was excited about the church in Corinth. He loved these people. He was their spiritual father, having planted the church. It was a dynamic, gifted spiritual community. But their effectiveness in impacting the Corinthian culture and in ministering to one another was being undermined by jealousy, factions, intellectual arrogance, and selfish ambition.

John Stott in his book -  The Preacher's Portrait:

"To God's revealed message men must humbly submit.... I believe that this 'let him become a fool' is one of the hardest words of Scripture to the proud hearts and minds of men. Like the brilliant intellectuals of ancient Greece our contemporaries have unbounded confidence in...human reason. They want to think their way to God by themselves, and to gain credit for discovering God by their own effort. But God resists such swellings of pride on the part of the finite creature. Of course men have been given minds to use, and they are never to stifle or smother them, but they must humble them reverently before the revelation of God, becoming in Paul's word 'fools' and in Christ's word 'babes'. It is only babes to whom God reveals himself, and only fools whom he makes wise."

Four rhetorical questions: "Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

John Stott's book Essays in Evangelical Ethics captures the kind of vision for us today. It is the vision of who God is, the breadth of His plan for us, His wisdom, the expansive view of how we ought to live life:

"The vision we need is the vision of God himself; the God of the whole biblical revelation; the God of creation who made all things fair and good, and made man male and female to bear his image and subdue his world; the God of the covenant of grace who in spite of human rebellion has been calling out a people for himself; the God of compassion and justice who hates oppression and loves the oppressed; the God of the incarnation who made himself weak, small, limited and vulnerable, and entered our pain and alienation; the God of resurrection, ascension and Pentecost, and so of universal authority and power; the God of the church or the kingdom community to whom he has committed himself for ever, and whom he sends into the world to live, serve, suffer and die; the God of history who is working according to a plan and towards a conclusion; the God of the eschaton, who one day will make all things new.
There is no room for pessimism here, or for apathy either. There is room only for worship, for expectant faith, and for practical obedience in witness and service. For once we have seen something of the glory of our God, and of the greatness of his commission, we can only respond, 'I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision."