1 Corinthians 2:1–12

¹Brothers and sisters, when I came to you, I didn’t speak about God’s mystery^aas if it were some kind of brilliant message or wisdom. ²While I was with you, I decided to deal with only one subject—Jesus Christ, who was crucified. ³When I came to you, I was weak. I was afraid and very nervous. ⁴I didn’t speak my message with persuasive intellectual arguments. I spoke my message with a show of spiritual power ⁵so that your faith would not be based on human wisdom but on God’s power. 

⁶However, we do use wisdom to speak to those who are mature. It is a wisdom that doesn’t belong to this world or to the rulers of this world who are in power today and gone tomorrow. ⁷We speak about the mystery of God’s wisdom. It is a wisdom that has been hidden, which God had planned for our glory before the world began. ⁸Not one of the rulers of this world has known it. If they had, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory. ⁹But as Scripture says: 

“No eye has seen, 

no ear has heard, 

and no mind has imagined 

the things that God has prepared 

for those who love him.” 

¹⁰God has revealed those things to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches everything, especially the deep things of God. ¹¹After all, who knows everything about a person except that person’s own spirit? In the same way, no one has known everything about God except God’s Spirit. ¹²Now, we didn’t receive the spirit that belongs to the world. Instead, we received the Spirit who comes from God so that we could know the things which God has freely given us.