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“For the word of the cross is foolishness” 1 Corinthians 18
We have gotten pretty clever over the years. We’ve created a lot of nice buildings and cities, and we have made plenty of fancy gadgets, we know a lot about science and medicine. We can find out about what happened in the past, discover what is going on in space, we even have a good go at predicting the future. If there is information about something you can now find it at the click of a button and have a conversation about it with someone anywhere in the world.
Knowledge is available to most of the developed world but wisdom that is something different. Most would argue wisdom is something that comes with experience or age.
Cervantes said ‘Time ripens all things, no man is born wise’. Mankind has been around for a good while now and as a society we have acquired a lot of wisdom, perhaps this is measurable by our advances in philosophical and ethical thought, or our development of law. The human race is strong too, we are probably getting stronger, taller and faster than ever before. Perhaps we could look to our sportsmen for examples of this. In the last hundred years we ran 100m 0.89secs faster, the marathon 31secs faster, jumped the high jump 47cm higher and pole vaulted 212cm higher.
To borrow from Spinal Tap, if you got human ability and turned it all the way up to 11 and God was playing at 1, the gulf between the two would still be immeasurable.
It says in 1 Corinthians 25 ‘Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.’ This kinda dampens the bonfire of ‘how great we are’ so to speak but that’s not the whole picture, read on through it in verse 27 ‘but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong’ So if you recognise that you aren’t really that great, that you aren’t that clever, that you aren’t that strong then God wants to use you for His glory.
This is the Foolish Network manifesto, being fools for God’s glory. We believe in our foolish dependance on God, that makes no sense to the wisdom of man, we can actually be His glory. We have realised that we are not smart, we don’t have lots of money, or masses of equipment, or endless amounts of fantastic ideas, but we know that God does. We long to see God’s wisdom communicated to those around us in fresh ways, we long to see people experience God through creativity and art. The dream is to start and expand, we don’t want this to be just about one thing, one medium. We long for others to join us; writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers, designers, painters, sculptors, a network of fools.
We hope to challenge conventional wisdom we don’t want to be so scared of something failing we never bother to start. So if you hear the call answer it.
1 Corinthians 1 (The Message)
“That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God…..If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.”