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• Anyone in marketing knows that to sell someone on something, you must know what the prospective buyer wants to hear.
• When Paul wrote his first letter to the church in Corinth, the church was trying to look attractive to the outside world.
• The Corinthian church was marked by immorality, heresy, slack discipline and division—and Paul combats this by presenting the centerpiece of the Gospel.
  -1 Corinthians 1:10–25

• The Corinthians were divided over different personalities they claimed to follow—Peter, Apollos, Paul, or Christ—and people were slowly shaping their Christianity around how they thought these teachers would teach the gospel.
• Paul reproaches all of these groups, stating that to focus on any one of these personalities is to remove the Cross from the center of the Gospel.
• The marketing mentality in Corinth wanted to slowly diminish the Cross, to make the Gospel message more comfortable.
• Paul wasn't buying that because he knew God wouldn't buy it—the Cross is God's way of showing his love for the world.
• Illustration: Nien Cheng, in her book Life and Death in Shanghai, tells how she saw grace in the beauty of a spider spinning its web while imprisoned under the Red Guard.
• The Cross is unpleasant, but we must resist the temptation to replace it with something glitzy.

• 1 Corinthians 1:18
• If the Cross has not touched your life, Paul is inferring that you are in a state of perishing—dying a little bit every day.
• For those who are constantly in the state of being saved, the message of the Cross is the power of God.
• Illustration: When living in Boston, MacDonald used to be intimidated as he would drive by Harvard, MIT, and Boston University.
• For the truly wise, the Cross must be in its central place.

• In Corinth, the real champion was the person who could persuade other people through the force of argument.
• Paul states that no one is persuaded to follow Christ—they are called.
• The Jews could not hear the message of the Cross because a cross was a means of executing criminals; the Greeks could not hear the message of Savior dying for them because their gods had no emotions and felt no pain.
• The only people who would listen to the message of the Cross are people who know they are lost, who know they are at the end of themselves.

• Illustration: Charles Berry, an English preacher in the 19th century, had a re-conversion experience when he could offer a dying woman nothing but the powerful message of the Cross.

• One day, some of us will realize we have exhausted all other routes of living a full life, and we will have to come to the Cross—and new life will begin.