but last night on our back porch my just under thirty-year-old married nephew (the one who's a foot taller than everybody ((who, I heard later, got this text from my just under twenty-year-old niece who's a foot shorter than everybody)) ;) said, "Oh, you gotta hear this."
Then he began to read 1 Corinthians 1:26-31, which, as the members of our local church know, has long been our congregation's touchstone definitive chapter and verse, according to our pastor.
But I'd never heard it said quite like this before. You've got to imagine it being read in a serious "contemporary youth pastor style" voice -
"Take a good
look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life.
I
don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many
influential,
not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that
God deliberately chose
men and women that the culture overlooks and
exploits and abuses,
chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow
pretensions of the “somebodies”?
That makes it quite clear that none of
you can get by with blowing your own horn before God.
Everything that we
have— right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh
start—
comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the
saying,
“If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.”
( 1 Cor. 1:26-31, from The Message translation)
So, um, you're not really getting the feeling that we're the brightest and the best, high society group, etc.? Yeah, me neither. Just nobodies. Good.
Anyone else out there?