NOTHING BUT JESUS

Dr. W. A. Criswell

1 Corinthians 2:1

3-27-55 

 

In the message of the morning we were in the conclusion of the first chapter of the first Corinthian letter. And now tonight we begin the second chapter of the first Corinthian letter. And if you will turn to the passage, you can look at it while I try to preach from it, 1 Corinthians, the second chapter. It is of a part and of a piece with the first chapter. Now the second chapter begins:

 

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony—the oracles, the revelation—of God.

For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.

And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power;

That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

 

Now that is the passage, and we take the first part of it tonight:

 

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the oracles of God.

For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

 

And the thought tonight is from that word, “I determined not to know anything, except Jesus and Jesus crucified.”

Now indeed Paul had a tremendous reversal in the personal devotion, in the commitment of his life. And out of that tremendous reversal came personal and theological problems that were almost overwhelming. Paul was trained in all the learning of the rabbis. He possibly, almost certainly, was a member of the Sanhedrin. He was a young man in his thirties, maybe just thirty, certainly not more than thirty-one or thirty-two when that tremendous reversal came in his life.

For a young man like that to be a member of the Sanhedrin, the highest court of the Israelitish nation, was one of the most signal honors that could come to any neophyte. He said in his letters, boasting not because of pride, but because others forced him to defend his ministry—his apostleship in Jesus—he said of himself that he excelled in the religion of the Jewish people above all others of his own peerage, of his own age, his own group.

He was a fine, brilliant young student. He was a disciple of the school of Gamaliel and he was given to all the religion of Judaism. Then in the midst of his fervent and zealous exposition of rabbinical lore and knowledge—in the midst of it zealous, even to the persecution of the church, even in strange cities—in the midst of that devotion to the tradition of his fathers, he became a Christian, the exact opposite of what he had been expounding.

Well I say, any such reversal in any man’s life would posit great personal and intellectual problems. So when Paul began to preach, it was not immediately upon his conversion; but he went into Arabia and the sands of the desert, and he stayed there three solid years. There he communed with God. There he talked to Christ. There he wrestled, like Jacob did at the River Jabbok. There he wrestled with God, and there did those revelations come to him that made him refer to the gospel that he preached as “my gospel”:

 

Though I, or an angel from heaven, preach unto you any other gospel than the gospel that I preached unto you, let him be anathema.

 

For I have received from the Lord Jesus that which I also delivered unto you.

 

The gospel that Paul preached came out of tremendous personal struggle before the Lord. And the things that he preached came by direct revelation from Jesus Christ. And I say, that period of tremendous reversal came right after his conversion, when he opened his heart to God to the new revelation and the new faith in Christ Jesus.

So he began to preach it, initially in the city of Damascus when he returned from Arabia. In the city of Damascus he first lifted up his voice, preaching Jesus and Him crucified. They let him out, preserving his life, by letting him down in a basket over the wall.

Then he went to Jerusalem and he preached the same gospel: Jesus and Him crucified. The brethren sent him away, lest he be destroyed.

In the first missionary journey, in Pisidian Antioch the Judaizing people raised up against him, and he was expelled from the city for preaching Jesus and Him crucified. At Lystra he was stoned and dragged outside the city for dead, but he arose with his life quickened within him, his breath restored by God; he arose still to preach Jesus and Him crucified.

In Philippi he was beaten, and with Silas praised Him in a dungeon; but he was still preaching Jesus and Him crucified. In Thessalonica and in Berea where he suffered persecution—as everywhere else that he preached—he still was true to the gospel that he received from the Lord Himself. He was preaching Jesus and Him crucified.

Then something happened in the city of Athens. I do not know what, I do not know why. You can be persecuted and you can be beat, you can be put in stocks and in chains, you can be placed on the inside of prison walls, and if you have a great conviction, if you have a tremendous commitment, the harder you are persecuted, the more adamant do those convictions crystallize in your soul.

But there is something in a man’s life, a weakness in the way he is put together. I do not know what it is, but there is something in the composition of a man’s soul that, when he is in dead earnest, when he is delivering his soul, he has a great truth, and he is trying to say it to the people, and he looks out there, and the folks out there laugh at him and ridicule and scorn, and it will unnerve and unhinge and unhook him like nothing else in the world.

I say, you can persecute a man for what he is preaching, and, if he is sincere, persecution just makes him the more fervent and zealous in his zeal to make known those truths. But laugh at him, eschew him, make fun of him, scorn him, and it does something to him.

Now especially is that true if the scoffing and the ridicule is done by intellectuals, people of the university, people of training, people of knowledge and understanding, people of scholarship and background. Let them belittle him, let them speak of the ignorance in his life. What he does he does because he does not know any better; why listen to him? If he had studied, if he had learned, if he were a product of the schools, he would not be as he is. And to laugh, and to joke, and to belittle, and to ridicule is a weapon that not many men can withstand.

Now Paul was human. He was a great man of God and had committed himself to the gospel of Christ. But his experience at Athens was something he had never met before. Every time he preached, it would either be in an atmosphere of either tremendous devotion to the cause or tremendous opposition. But in any event, it was serious and in dead earnest, either way.

But it Athens they never touched a hair on his head, they never laid a hand on his body, they never so much as put the weight of one finger on him. The intellectuals, the Epicureans and the Stoic philosophers, as they listened to him preach the Lord Jesus, they looked at each other and with raised eyebrows said, “Well. Well.” And some of them laughed out loud. And some of the more courteous said, “Yes, yes, we will—we will hear you again on this matter. Yes, yes, we will come back again. Yes, yes”—and in disdain and in intellectual superiority, smiling and laughing at one another.

Now I say that forced the apostle Paul into a reexamination of his faith, of all of his commitment, of all of his devotion, of all of his preaching. And if you do not have that background, the things that you find here written by Paul do not have much meaning to you, for Paul will be saying—listen to him, “The Lord sent me to preach the gospel, not with the wisdom and the sophistry of men” not like an Epicurean, not like a Stoic, not like a Platonic teacher, not like a Socratic philosopher, not like an Aristotilean disciple:

 

not with the wisdom of men, that the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

For after that, in the wisdom of the world

 

—the smartness of the world, the brilliance of the world, the sophistry of the world, “the world by its wisdom” by its sophistry, by its metaphysical achievements, by its philosophical insights—

 

the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe…

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness,

 

—idiocy—it is ridiculousness!—

 

But unto us who are called, both Jews and Greeks, why, it is the power of God, and the wisdom of God and the gift of God.

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not in sophistry

 

—came not preaching philosophy or metaphysics—when I came to you, I came not with beautiful and excellent orations—

 

when I came to you, I came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the revelations of God.

For I determined

 

—when he had just left Athens, with all of that in his heart and in his soul, “For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”

Now in another message, maybe still another, we will have other things to say. But tonight at the beginning of this revival meeting, I am taking this text as a delineation of our task in this ministry. This is a thing to which this Pastor, this pulpit and, I am persuaded, our people are fully committed.

First, we have here a definition of method, “I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” For my preaching is not a system of words, lest my message should be of none effect, for, “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” First, I say, a definition of method. How shall our church be organized? How shall it be run? Around what shall it be built? And how shall we know and how shall we take seriously the commandment of our Lord to evangelize the world? How shall we do it?

This is how we shall do it. We shall build our church around the preaching ministry of the Son of God. We shall build our church around its pulpit. We shall build our church around its sanctuary. We shall build our church around the high altar before the Lord. We shall build our church around the message of Jesus Christ.

A definition of how we shall do: we shall build our church around the ministry, the breaking of bread and the preaching of the Son of God. All the other things that we do in our church are but to lead to that great and high and holy and precious hour when the Book is opened and appeal is made in the name of Christ.

And of those things we have many, we have many. We prayed all last week in the daytime, and then in the evening, we have prayer services. Pray for what? That people might be saved, “It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” Our praying was to the end that, when the pastor lifts his hand, God might bare His arm to save. What is it? It is a knock at the door. But in no wise, and in no sense, is it our persuasion that visitation evangelism could ever take the place of the gathering of our people together for the preaching of the gospel of the Son of God.

We have many, many other programs in the church. We have a good recreational program. We have a great social program. We have our retreats. We have our Sunday school. We have our Training Union, our brotherhood, our W.M.U. We have a great program that goes by day and by night, seven days of every week.

But the great end and the great purpose that lies back of all that we do is reaching out through this holy hour on Sunday morning and on Sunday night. This is when we reach out by the preaching of the cross and ask people to accept Christ as Savior. Our church is built around this focal point: the preaching of the Word of God.

There are many substitutes, in our day especially, that are made for that. The church comes together and they look at a picture show. The church comes together and they go through Chautauqua services. The church comes together and they have many and varied programs. But always and without exception, that makes for a weak church, the spiritual depth of the people being thinner and thinner and more and more shallow.

“It pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” “And the word of the Lord came to Isaiah.” “And the word of God came to Jeremiah.” “And the word of the Lord came to Amos, and he lifted up his voice.”

And in those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, and saying, “Repent ye; for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

 

And Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom and saying, “Repent ye, and believe the gospel.”

 

It is a delineation, a defining of method: how shall we do? We shall do this.

“We are determined not to know anything but Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” “It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” This is our method.

We have here a definition of content: what shall we preach? What shall we preach? Why, this is what we shall preach. We shall preach the new theology. We shall preach the new light. We shall preach the new psychology. We shall preach all of these things that go into psychiatry. We shall preach all of the things that enter into the latest book reviews, the latest magazine articles, and the latest current events, and what we think about all the social issues of the day. We shall preach intellectualism. We shall preach social amelioration. This is what we shall preach: the sophistry of the passing moment.

No, sir! No, sir! We have here defined the content of our preaching, “For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”

Our preaching, our preaching is the Lord in the beginning, in the middle, in the end, and all in between. We have one message and one sermon: it is the Lord, it is the Lord.

Somebody listening to Spurgeon time after time, somebody said that he had one sermon, that he preached one sermon all the time. And somebody came to him and said, “Mr. Spurgeon, a man who has heard you preach a lot says you have just one sermon, one sermon, and that you preach that sermon all the time.” And Mr. Spurgeon said, “That is right. That is right.” He says, “Wherever in the Bible I begin, I make a beeline for the cross and start preaching about Jesus.”

Our preaching is about the Lord Jesus: that is it, that is it! We have one gospel, we have one message: Jesus Christ and Him crucified, “And I determined not to know anything among you except the cross of Jesus,” who died for our sins and was raised for our justification.

I can tell it anywhere, anywhere, anywhere. When a man preaches the gospel, he can see it anywhere. In the Garden of Eden, animals were slain by the Lord to cover the nakedness of Adam and his wife, and their blood was poured out on the ground—the first shedding of blood. And He made coats of skins to cover the nakedness of Adam and his wife. That is it. That is it, the blood. That is the gospel; that is Jesus. That shedding of blood looks forward to the covering, the atonement of Jesus Christ. That is it. That is it.

“When I see the blood, I will pass over you.” That is it. That is it. That is the way I will cleanse. That is it. That is it. When I see the blood, I will pass over. That is the gospel: Jesus and Him crucified.  Or listen to Isaiah:

 

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth.

 

That is it. That is it. It is the blood. It is the blood—the Lamb of God. That is it. That is it: taking the worst sinner and making his scarlet sins white in the blood of the Lamb. That is it. That is it.

In the passage I read this morning, the soldier pierced His side, and out rushed blood and water. That is it. That is it. That is it. It has a color to it. The preaching of the Son of God always has a color to it. It is a scarlet message, it is a crimson way. And the message of the cross is always the preaching of the blood.

“For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” We have a definition of content: Jesus Christ and Him crucified; Jesus buried; Jesus raised from the dead. That is it.

Every time you see the Pastor baptize a boy or a girl or man or woman who has given his heart to the Lord Jesus—that is it, “He died for our sins and was buried and was raised for our justification.” “We died in the likeness of His death and were raised in the likeness of His resurrection.” That is it.

We know one thing. We know one thing, we know one thing: Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

I make a last avowal. A definition of method: preaching and everything leading to that sacred hour; a definition of content: Jesus Christ and Him crucified; a definition of life:

 

I am crucified with Christ Jesus; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave His life for me.

 

“I determined not to know to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified”—the story of Christ, not man, and the Spirit who exalts Him, raising Him, raising Him, not looking at the man, not looking at the man, not looking at the preacher, not looking at men, but looking at the Lord Jesus. And the more the Spirit of the crucified Jesus is in us, the more do we hide ourselves away, that He might be seen. Those nearest to the Lord in time were so much like that: you can hardly find them; all you can find is the Lord Jesus that they uphold.

For example, I turn in my Book. The first Gospel here, you say, is the Gospel of Matthew. What makes you think so? There is not a man in the earth who knows. The ancient traditions said Matthew wrote an Aramaic Gospel, and on the basis of that Aramaic Gospel, this first Gospel was made and translated into Greek. But you do not find Matthew there: you do not find his name, you do not find his signature. He wrote it. It did not say, “Matthew hid himself away.” Just, there is the Lord Jesus, look unto Him.

Who wrote the second Gospel? You say Mark. You could read Mark’s Gospel a thousand years, you will never find a signature to it. You will never find Mark mentioned. The tradition of the fathers comes down to us and says, “Mark wrote it.” That is all. But Mark hid himself away, holding up the Lord Jesus.

You say the third Gospel is Luke’s. You could read it all you like, you will never see Luke there. There is not a mention of him or a reference to him. He hid himself away, raising up the Lord Jesus.

The Gospel of John: John never calls his name. When he refers to himself in the story, because he was one of the disciples, he never calls his name. He just says, “the disciple that Jesus loved,” or, “the disciple who laid on His bosom,” at the Last Supper. It was the Lord Jesus, not John—holding up the Lord Jesus.

That crucified life is like that: not we; it is Him. It is the Lord, not us. It is Him, not of us. It is the Lord Jesus—all the Lord Jesus.

A man went to hear two preachers. When he heard the first one, a world-famous man, he said, “What a great orator. What a marvelous speaker. What a glorious preacher.” When he heard the second one, he went away saying, “What a marvelous Savior, what a glorious Lord. What a marvelous Redeemer, what a wonderful, wonderful Jesus.”

The commitment of our lives: none of self and all of Thee, Christ Jesus, Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus. For us, we hide ourselves away, we put ourselves in the background. We bury our faces in our hands, we hide our faces like the seraphim who are close to the throne of God. Do you remember them? With twain of their wings, they flew. With twain of their wings, they covered their feet. And with twain of their wings, they covered their faces. Who would be equal to stand in the presence of God? We hide our faces, we cover our faces.

Lord, Lord, that they do not see me, that they do not see us, because, if they do, they will stumble, they will make mistakes. Looking at us, they will fall into error looking at us. But looking at the Lord Jesus—not preaching ourselves, but Christ Jesus, and ourselves His slaves—and ourselves His slaves for your sake. If in His name we can wash feet, if in His name we can minister, if in His name we can serve, if in His name, we can help, we are your slaves for Jesus’ sake. But it is not of us, it is the Lord Jesus. Look to Him. Look to Him.

I do not know how we are; I know He is all right. I do not know how we will fare; I know He is all right. I do not know but that we will fall and stumble; but I know He is all right. I do not know with what error we live our lives every day; but I know He is all right.

And if we can just look to Jesus! Do not look to man, do not look to organizations, do not look to church, do not look to ordinances, do not look to the preacher. Look to Him, keep your eyes on Him, and I know you will be all right. He is all right. All about Jesus—“For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”

May we pray?

Our Lord, all in the spirit of dedication written large on the page here by Thy servant Paul, would to God that there be a like commitment on the part of all the members of this church, the body of Christ. All of Christ: we are doing one thing, our lives are committed to one thing; not the exaltation of self, not pride and vanity and vainglory, but lifting up the cross, raising high the banner of Jesus, pointing men to the Lamb of God.

Look! Look! Behold, the Lamb of God, the Lord Jesus! Look to Him. Look and live. There He is. There He is. He is knocking at the door of your heart; let Him in, let Him in. Look to Jesus; look and live, my brother, live.

Oh Christ, as we stand in this holy place, that it might be a raising of the cross on which the Son of God died, that men might go out these doors, not conscious of us, but conscious of the Lord who died for us, who was raised that we might live with Him—that all that we do or say might flow to the glory of our Master, less and less and, finally, none of us; more and more and, finally, all of Him.

Oh, may the spirit of sacrifice, of self-effacement, of the abandonment of all that is selfish and personal—let it be more and more of the power and the presence and the glory of the Lord Jesus determining one thing: raising high the cross of Christ in the pulpit, in our lives, in all that we do, looking to Him, pointing to Him.

Bless, Lord, the appeal tonight, that as our people bear it on the wings of prayer, that somebody will be saved. May somebody tonight look and live. May somebody tonight give his heart to Jesus. May somebody tonight come down that aisle and take the Pastor by the hand, “Here I am, and here I come. I have felt His presence, I have sensed His call, and here I am, responding.”

The Lord grant it….

 

 

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