It takes a lot to stand for Christ today. Many Christians have cowed under the pressure of ridicule. Others have used Paul as an example of boldness. What is there in his life that gives us confidence today?

When Paul the apostle was about to go to Corinth to preach the gospel, he was afraid.

As Greeks, the Corinthians could boast an ancestry of a whole galaxy of wise men. Everybody in the market place had heard of Plato and Aristotle as the deepest thinkers that had ever appeared among men. If Plato and Aristotle had not solved all the problems of life, it was only because some problems were too deep to solve, even for the deepest thinkers among men.

Paul knew all this. How then could he go to these Greeks and expect them to listen to his simple story of Jesus and the resurrection? How could he expect that these people, who speculated wishfully about some sort of bliss in the hereafter for all good men, would now believe that they must flee from the wrath of God to come?

Would these Greeks, of all people, believe in the Jew, Jesus Christ, as the One through whose death and resurrection alone men must be saved? Would they listen to Paul even for one second if he told them this Jesus would come in the clouds of heaven one day to judge all men, including them? Probably not.

Paul would not go to Corinth in his own strength. But he would not have to. Someone had changed his life and given him new strength. For Paul had seen the Lord on the way to Damascus. Ever since, he was ready to go anywhere. The Lord had made him a "chosen vessel … to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel" (Acts 9:15).

Having seen the Lord and being filled with the Holy Ghost (Acts 9:17), Paul was fearless before the Jews, even when they sought to kill him.

What then of the world? Would they be more hard-hearted than were the Jews? No, they could not be. They, like the Jews, were sinners in Adam (Rom. 5:12). They, like the Jews, were carnally minded and therefore at enmity against God (Rom. 8:7). They, like the Jews, were by nature "dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2:1).

Writing to the Corinthian church at a later date, Paul himself was amazed at their conversion and ascribed it not to his eloquence or to his persuasive power of reasoning but to the "Holy Ghost" (1 Cor. 2:4-5). "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Cor. 2:14).

When Paul was about to go to the Corinthians, the Lord graciously appeared to him anew saying, "Be not afraid, but speak … for I am with thee … for I have much people in this city" (Acts 18:9, 10). Both humbled and emboldened, Paul now goes forth. He does not ask the Corinthians to be open-minded enough to allow a place for his Christ among the list of their gods. Not in his own wisdom but in that of the Holy Spirit, Paul now challenges the wisdom of the Greek: "Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolish­ness of preaching to save them that believe" (1 Cor. 1:20-21).

Humility and boldness⤒🔗

But how dare we who are not apostles challenge the wisdom of the world today? Do we dare say to the wise men of modern times that their wisdom has been made foolishness by God? The answer is that we must do this. We are not apostles. The Lord will not appear to us in­dividually when we are about to speak to some great philosopher or scientist. The Lord has not given us greater minds or deeper insights than He has given to the wise men of the world. But He has given to us everything that we need to minister the gospel as Paul did. Note again what He gave to Paul.

In the first place, Christ gave to Paul by His appearance the absolute conviction that in Him alone is truth and salvation. Paul now knew that what God had spoken in His Word was undeniably true. He knew therefore that any claim to truth that was not drawn from Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life was, at bottom, a lie. He knew that any claim to truth not based on Christ, on His death and resurrection, was based on unrepentant sinful man.

In the second place, Paul went forth, as already noted, in the strength of the Holy Spirit. Writing to the Corinthians, in retrospect, Paul shows how closely the vision of Christ was related to his enduement by the Holy Spirit. "Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (2 Cor. 3:17).

In the third place, Paul, filled with the vision of the Lord and of the Holy Spirit, undertakes his work by first laying it before the Lord as being too great for him. The Lord said to Ananias after he had appeared to Paul on the way to Damascus: "Be­hold, he prayeth" (Acts 9:11).

Modern wisdom made foolishness by God←⤒🔗

If then, we would be servants of our Lord and followers of Paul's example, we must, in all humility and in all boldness, challenge the wisdom of the modern world. The wisdom of modern man, like the wisdom of the Greeks, centres in man as having truth in himself. It is this modern wisdom that, just as the wisdom of the Greeks of which Paul spoke, has been made foolishness by God.

Modern philosophy and science, by and large, do not believe that man and the facts of his environment are created and directed by God. Modern man does not think that he is a sinner and therefore, as such, blind to the true interpretation of life and its meaning. Modern man is without God, without Christ, and therefore without hope in the world.

Modern man assumes that the world is here by chance and that man, himself a product of chance, must by means of his logic (again a product of chance) bring order out of chaos. Thus, man's wis­dom is foolishness with God.

The believer in Christ must say that without Christ there is no truth and goodness anywhere that will finally stand before God.

Modern thought, like the prodigal son, is at the swine trough. The believer does not do his duty to men unless he calls them to repentance, and there­with back to the Father's house.