Devotional 16 October 2025

October 16, 2025 • Steve Torres

1 Corinthians 1:27-29.jpg

“For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” (1 Corinthians 1:26–30, ESV)

Paul reminds the Corinthians that the very existence of the church is a testimony to the wisdom of God overturning the wisdom of man. When the world builds, it selects the strong, the educated, and the influential. God, however, forms His people out of those the world calls weak and unworthy. This is no accident: it is divine design. “The LORD did not set his love on you or choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the fewest,” Moses told Israel, “but it is because the LORD loves you” (Deuteronomy 7:7–8). God’s choice originates in Himself, not in us.

This truth dismantles every human philosophy that seeks redemption or progress apart from Christ. The socialist, the rationalist, and the idealist each promise that mankind can ascend through education, equity, or enlightenment. Yet all such systems, as Paul warns in Colossians 2:8, are “philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” They begin with man and end in pride. God begins with His Son and ends in glory.

By choosing the foolish to shame the wise, God reveals that no intellect or system can reconcile humanity to Himself. “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him” (1 Corinthians 2:14). The cross is not an example of self-improvement: it is the death of self and the birth of new life by grace. Christ Himself becomes our wisdom and righteousness (v. 30), the very things the world claims to produce on its own.

Every human project to build utopia collapses under its own corruption. Only in Christ can the rejected be accepted, the sinner justified, and the dead made alive. In Him, God fulfills His promise: “Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people’” (Hosea 1:10, Romans 9:25). The result is clear: “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (Jeremiah 9:23–24).

When God calls, He calls the unlikely, so that the world may see that salvation is not from man to God, but from God to man. The world exalts ability; God exalts grace. And grace alone will stand forever.