And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.
1 Corinthians 2:1–5
The power of Paul’s words lies in the divine logic of the gospel, not merely in the word-order of his sentences. What, then, is the logic of 1 Corinthians 2:1–5?
It’s that the message of the gospel is God-centered (“I proclaimed to you the testimony about God” v.1) and Christ-dominated (“nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (v.2).
This gospel requires its heralds to be experientially united to Christ in the outworking of his death (“weakness,” “fear,” “trembling” v.3). For, as Paul elsewhere explains more fully, new life works in others when “death is at work in us” (2 Cor. 4: 10–12; cf. Phil. 3:10–12; Col.1:24).
This in turn implies that our style of preaching must also be marked
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