Eph 1:1+2 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are also faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. We are in the midst of our consideration of the active grace of God that is mentioned in this opening blessing of the Apostle Paul upon the church. We are seeing that grace is the loving attribute of God that is lavished upon us individually and corporately in Jesus Christ Our Lord.
Grace is showered upon the church in many, countless ways. I would like to share a portion of a letter than I recently received from Ken Hartman. I was very blessed with what has opened up in him with regard to grace and pray that it would bless each one of us. Ken writes, I have never viewed God’s expression of grace from such an all-encompassing perspective – starting with Jesus as the ultimate manifestation of God’s grace and moving through to the common day-to-day occurrences in our lives. Grace is at the foundation of everything – how wonderful. Grace spans our entire existence in Christ. From the ability to submit and desire to commit to Christ, to our quietness and confidence in Christ. My humility, my strength in Christ, my freedom in Christ; all are rooted in God’s grace. From our original surrender to our eventual service within the Body of Christ, it’s all about God’s grace. Christ’s love to all, Ken.
What a joy unto the Lord it is to recognize some of the reality established in His grace. It is the grace of God that opens up the insight of our beings unto the very heart of God. It is the grace of God that meets our every need. It is in the grace of God that we find the peace and deep joy in the knowledge of the sovereignty of God, which carries us through the most violent, turbulent storms of our sojourn in this world. It is the grace of God that establishes the Holy Spirit’s guidance as the very wisdom of God to face every situation. 
It is here that we pick up once more, looking at the Grace of God in His wisdom as He works so benevolently in our lives. As you will recall, we are tracing that wisdom of God through many scriptures, seeking after the Holy Spirit to manifest Himself in our lives with more and more clarity. We are seeking the wisdom of God as declared throughout scripture to become the source of all our thoughts, hopes, and lives. We had ended with a number of truths, comparing God’s wisdom to the foolishness of man’s supposed wisdom, as shared by the prophet Isaiah. Now let us consider the insight of God as given through the prophet Jeremiah, concerning the value of God’s wisdom set against the futility of man’s wisdom.
Jer 8:9 The wise men shall be put to shame, they shall be dismayed and taken; lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord, and what wisdom is in them? Much like Isaiah, in fact as is true in all of scripture, man’s wisdom is seen for what it is, nothing. Note that Jeremiah saw that the wise men will be put to shame. They will be mortified at the foolishness that they have perpetrated on the people of this age. They will suffer the humiliation of eternity for having put forth the futility of self and calling it wisdom. What man or woman, subscribing to this world’s doctrines and philosophies will be able to stand in the presence of God at that day, and successfully argue their case before the Holy One? He is the Righteous One, the Omnipotent One, the Omniscient One, the Omnipresent One and He knows every thought and intent? Not a single person, using this age’s wisdom, will gain anything from it except the eternal consciousness that they were deceived by this world and deceived others through their utter lack of wisdom.
Paul, in Rom 1:19-25, defines the lack of true knowledge and wisdom of man apart from God. There are no excuses in the lies of the ignorance and foolishness of man’s arguments against God. As we read, For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.
Thank the Lord that He has called us out of that darkness into His marvelous light. We no longer worship the creation, in all its futility. We worship the Creator of all things, Our Lord God Almighty. We rely on Him. We trust in Him. We rejoice in Him. We exalt Him! It is by His wisdom that we are here on this earth at this time, joined together the Body of Christ. It is in the wisdom of God’s grace that our lives shine forth as a beacon of light unto all those around us. They have no excuse for their refusal to worship God; we are the living proof of that. Our lives, as lived forth from the Lord, are the constant witness of the goodness of our God.  
That wisdom of God announced this truth way back in the times of Daniel. Dan 12:3 And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever. 
Jeremiah then takes this to the following conclusion, the only conclusion possible in the light of Jesus Christ. Jer 9:23+24 Thus says the Lord: "Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practice steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight, says the Lord." 
This is wisdom, to come to know in reality, in truth, in spirit, in life that the Lord is Holy and Sovereign. In His wisdom, we know that He has all things, not some things, not most things, not just the big things, but that He has all things under His glorious control. In His Wisdom, we recognize that He always looks upon us and works in us through His steadfast love. In His Wisdom and Grace we are shown that His delight is in the justice of His holiness which has been fully satisfied through the giving of His own Son because of the great love with which He loves us. Then, in even more abundance, we live in the utter assurance that the delight of the Lord is steadfastly focused upon us because He sees us in the absolute righteousness of Jesus Christ. That is wisdom. That is the expressed truth of God’s bountiful grace as He makes us His church, the Bride of Christ, the Body of Christ, His Beloved in Jesus Christ.
Because the focus of all God’s wisdom is centered in His Son, we need to always consider Christ in every aspect of our lives. That reality shows forth the gracious wisdom of God as we deal with everyone on the basis of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. Paul addresses the very aspect that Jeremiah declared as to upon whom the glory of man is focused. In the folly of humanity’s depravity, all the wisdom of man points to himself. He glories in his accomplishments, in his efforts, in his might, in his wisdom. He perches himself on a throne of self-righteousness in his feeble attempts to make a better world out of the chaos and absolute discord that is the malignant cancer of this age. 
Rather than being absorbed with all that human foolhardiness and hopelessness, Paul points to Christ as the source and the single focus of all glory. As Paul writes in Gal 6:14 But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. It is the grace of God that crucifies us to the world and the world to us. Please note that this goes far, far beyond simply seeking to live a better life. In God’s wisdom, He has brought us unto Himself through the death and resurrection of His Son. In His wisdom, He has given forth His Holy Spirit to dwell within us, always pointing us to Christ. In the wisdom of God, He has made His Living Word the sustenance of our lives through the effective ministry of His Word, in our lives by His Holy Spirit.
As we live by the faith of the Son of God, by the ministry of the Holy Spirit in full obedience to His Word, we will find that we are more and more being crucified to this world. The Holy Spirit is at work to put to death all the attractions and the desires of this age. Those things of this realm are to be left on the crucifixion side of the Cross of Jesus Christ. Some times, because we think that we are going to miss out in some measure of the pleasures of this age, we try to pull them over into the new life that we have in Jesus Christ. That is utterly impossible because there is no true pleasure or eternal joy in the things brought forth from wickedness and deception. It is this desire that the Lord puts to death within us. As He works and works so mightily to prove Himself over and over again, we lose any desire for the things of this world. We see it as dead, as decay, as nothing of value in comparison to the true life that we have in Christ. We are crucified to the lusts of this realm and all its deceitful attractions. Likewise, our heart’s focus is removed from the death of this age, and more and more centered into the life of Jesus Christ in all His resurrection power and glory. It is in that manner that our entire focus of being finds its glory in Him. This is fully established as the Son of God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, is lifted up above all that is in this realm, and honored as the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, God’s eternal wisdom is manifested in Him Alone. BY the Grace of God, He is the glory of our entire being, individually, corporately, triumphantly and eternally. 
Paul takes us even deeper into the grace of the wisdom of God being absolutely absorbed in the Lord as we deal with one another in the church. In 1 Cor 2:1-5, he writes When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words 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 much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. 
The legions of this world’s deceived, place their limited faith in human knowledge, in philosophy, in discernment, in abilities of reason, in conceptions, in imaginations, and in the false goodness of mankind’s intentions. There is an awe of those regarded as the authorities on this subject or that situation, this problem, or that psychological belief. Even within the organized church, there are many, many people who try to reason themselves into this belief or that doctrine. This type of faith is based not on the Lord, but in one’s ability to make the Lord fit into a limited human scope of intelligent consideration. We sway back and forth with the latest dogma that is promoted to make our minds accept the teachings through the human reasoning and logic of man’s wisdom. We will never find God’s wisdom centered in the strength of the arguments of these feeble minds. We will never find the truth of God centered in the persuasiveness of human concepts. The strength of human mental comprehension will never reveal the wisdom of God. Only He can show forth Himself in all His Omnipotence, Omniscience and Omnipresence.
Consider how the Lord worked in the Apostle Paul to present the truth of Christ to the Corinthians. First of all there was the determination that everything was to be centered on the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul was determined in his heart, unwavering in the purpose of seeing all the members of the Corinthian church in the light of Jesus Christ and His crucifixion power. Everything had to go through death to be brought forth in the life of Christ, and that was what the Apostle had as his focus in the dealings with the church. That is how we are to see and deal with one another. It all has to be in Christ. That is the wonder of the grace of God’s wisdom. We see beyond the visible, we see beyond the earthly residue, we see beyond the current state of affairs unto Jesus Christ living in each one of us. We need to determine, to be absolutely resolute in that manner of dealing with and approaching each other, in the wisdom of God.
Then, the Apostle Paul presented the Gospel of Christ in weakness and in much fear and trembling. Stop, one might shout! Our Lord is to be declared in all the power of His resurrection and glory, with all our might and force of being. However, consider the fact that the Apostle Paul had been a very skilled debater of the law with his Pharisee brethren. He was skilled with language and with the ability to convince another based on human logic, reasoning, and semantic skill. When he presented Christ to the Corinthians, when he addressed the issues and the needs, he wanted it to be everything of Jesus Christ and nothing of himself. He knew that for the full life of Christ to be proclaimed in all His resurrection power, it had to be God’s divine power and wisdom that brought these loved ones close to the heart of God. Paul wanted a deep and full relationship to grow in the hearts of the Corinthians, so he determined not to be the orator, simply the mouth through which God could speak forth His life in the power of the Holy Spirit into these seeking souls.   
The same needs to be true of everyone who proclaims the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The words we speak, the thoughts we carry, the talent we have are all unto the Lord for His purposes. We do not want our witness to be anything other than the Word of God, His feeding of His flock. There is nothing in any of us that can be more effective in bringing glory to God in one another than speaking forth only that which He establishes in life. If we proclaim anything other than the life of Christ Jesus, we are nothing more than clanging cymbals filling the air with noise. It is in our weakness and fear and trembling before the Lord, meaning awe and reverence for Him and everything of Him, that the power of God comes forth in life. Nothing of us, all of Him.
   Then notice that Paul sets aside the wisdom of mankind because the wisdom of man is not capable of presenting the things of God in a manner that will bring forth the fullness of the life of Jesus Christ. The words and thoughts of man are insufficient to describe the totality of a life unto God, founded in Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit, and living in complete obedience to His Word. Paul rather sought after God to establish Himself in His Gospel. Paul calls forth the reality that faith is not established in the wisdom of man, it is established by the demonstration of the Spirit and of power. God makes Himself known in His power, by the Holy Spirit, as He proves, over and over again, His trustworthiness, His love, His wisdom, His Life. We live by the power of God, not by the arguments of human knowledge. After all, man can argue this or that philosophy or wisdom. But that amounts to only hollow words that fall on the ears of the deaf. What God declares, God, in His omnipotence, does. What He does is always perfect and true and full of the glory of God’s wisdom. It is done! And, it is always done in the perfection of God’s timing. No delays, no hold-ups, no contractual differences. He will have His church and in His wisdom, He has created it in Jesus Christ Our Lord.
Oh what grace of God, to so call forth such as we unto Himself. Oh the wisdom of God seen in His church, His beloved. As the church is revealed in all the purity of being that which is the heart of God, it will be recognized as the utmost creation of love in the grace and wisdom of God through His Son. Let us praise and honor Him for ever and for ever. Amen
We conclude with the manifold wisdom of God as expressed in Hos 14:9 Whoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them; for the ways of the Lord are right, and the upright walk in them, but transgressors stumble in them. 
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are also faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen

Today’s benediction is from 1 Peter 1:18-25 You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the end of the times for your sake. Through him you have confidence in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God. Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere love of the brethren, love one another earnestly from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for "All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord abides for ever." That word is the good news which was preached to you. Amen