A Living Contradiction

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here. We are in a series called Unexpected. It's kind of, I think, trying to capture the book of 1 Corinthians and what Paul was doing in this book. He was, for instance, an unexpected apostle. He didn't even anticipate it. He was actually an enemy of the cross of Christ and the whole thing on his way to Damascus and everything was turned around in a moment by Jesus himself showing up in an unexpected way in the sense that Jesus didn't kill him. He didn't get him out of the way. He didn't use force. He called him by the gospel in his grace. And that became a paradigm and a pattern for the way, not only that experience, but then looking back and hearing about Jesus and his life, what Christianity is all about for him. And so he's an unexpected apostle and he comes to a place where Corinth has really high standards, they think, high standards of what to expect, how life should be, how people should be. If you're somebody that we need to listen to, you should have credentials. You should have money. You should have eloquence. You should have wisdom, charisma. You should come across somebody that we would like to be like. And Paul was weak and frail and a tent maker and nothing to look at. And they weren't quite sure what to do with that. The power's in the message, not necessarily the messenger. That's one of the truths about Christianity. Today, we're looking at the fact that Jesus himself was an unexpected Messiah and thank God he did the unexpected for us. Do you realize most of your life, you didn't figure out what was going to happen next? We talked about that last week with some predictions. And this isn't just true for those who just in life go like, this is what I plan to do and where I plan to go next and what's going to happen next. It more or less happens to you. Amy, did you plan on being a co-director of ACMNP? Never. And yet God has better plans. So there's a man named Philip Tetlock. He's a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania and he did a landmark study that he wrote up in a book called Expert Political Judgment. How good is it? How can we know? And in it, he studied 284 economic and political professionals and their predictions. He collected 80,000 predictions they had made and this is what he decided. He said, they, the experts, are just human in the end. They are dazzled by their own brilliance and hate to be wrong. Experts are led astray not by what they believe but how they think. In other words, they think they've figured it all out but when it happens, they only look back and say, look, I knew that was coming. How many of you have said that in life? Oh, I knew that was going to happen. I have a feeling my sister today, after she watched the Lions lose last night and all the emojis I got through the night while I was in bed because I get up early on Sundays, she would say to me today, she might be watching right now, I knew they were going to lose. I just knew it. She didn't know it. You don't go to a game knowing they're going to lose. But we think we know. We think we know everything and we don't know that much. So Daniel Kahneman wrote, everything makes sense in hindsight and we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday. The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future. Let me tell you, there was a lot of overconfidence in Corinth. This church on the Isthmus, that's a hard word to say, on the Isthmus between the northern part of Greece and the Peloponnesus, the south where Athens is, this little piece of land in between was the height of merchant life and economics because instead of a canal that ran through, they had to get all the stuff off the boat on this side, roll it across by logs, etc., to the other side and put it on a boat on the other side. And Corinth sat in the middle where all these people from all over the world and all this money was flowing through. It saved days and days of travel. And so that's why they did it. And they thought they knew it all. They were the end-all, be-all. And you will find in the letter of 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians where Paul talks about how much their knowledge just puffs them up, makes them really big. They thought they knew it all. They could control it all. I think we're kind of there too. And we think we recognize exactly what God would do and why he would do it and when he will do it. And Paul points out in this letter again and again, yeah, that's what you think, but he does the unexpected. He does the unexpected. And thank God he does. Because we don't need more of the same in this world. We get a lot more of the same all the time. So we're going to read 1 Corinthians 2, the whole chapter. It's not that long. To get his kind of...