Dear Friends,

When we seek to share our faith, our hope must not be in ourselves (how wise we are, how much we know, how well we explain the gospel, etc.), or in the one we hope to reach, but in God. Without His blessing we must surely fail. Why? Today’s devotional explains. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

I Corinthians 2:14

“Scripture sets before us spiritual truths — truths, that is, about God, and about created things in relation to God; and to grasp spiritual truths requires spiritual receptiveness. But no man has this by nature…. The habit of mind which enslaves the natural man, Paul tells us, is to set up his own ‘wisdom’ and make it ultimate, and so he is compelled to dismiss as foolishness all that does not accord with it. Without spiritual enlightenment, he will never be able to see the foolishness of his own wisdom, nor the wisdom of the ‘foolishness of God (1 Cor. 1:25; see the whole passage 1:18ff.) proclaimed in the gospel; hence he will never forsake the one for the other. Our Lord confirms this view of man. His repeated diagnosis of the unbelieving Pharisees was that they were blind, lacking the capacity to perceive spiritual realities (Mt. 15:14; 23:16, 17, 19, 26; Jn. 9:39-42); and He regarded spiritual perception where He found it, as a supernatural gift from God (Mt. 11:25;16:17).” [J. I. Packer, ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1958), p. 110-111]