10 These are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11 For who knows a person's thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. 14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. 15 The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, 16 for "who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.

Paul is still writing to Corinth, still working on the same problem. This was a city that respected clever people. Public speakers drew crowds. Philosophy was entertainment. And the church had absorbed the assumption underneath all of it, which is that the smartest person in the room gets closest to the truth.

Just before our passage, Paul has quoted a line about what no eye has seen and no ear has heard. Then he turns and says something that changes the whole direction of the conversation.

"These are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit."

Revealed. Not discovered, not worked out, not earned by study. Someone opened a door from the inside.

That one word rearranges everything. If the deep things of God were the kind of thing you could reach by thinking hard enough, then the clever really would be closer, and the rest of us would be catching up forever. Paul is saying it does not work that way. Nobody climbs up to God. God comes down and tells us.

Then he says something that sounds strange the first time you notice it.

"The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God."

Searching usually means you do not have something yet. We search a room because we lost the keys. But that is not the picture here. The word carries the sense of exploring something thoroughly, going all the way through it, knowing it to the bottom. The Spirit is not hunting for information God is withholding. The Spirit is at home in those depths.

Think of the difference between a tourist and someone who grew up in a place. The tourist reads the map and finds the famous streets. The one who grew up there knows which door sticks, which neighbour is kind, what the place is like in the rain. That is not more information. It is a different kind of knowing.

There are depths in God. Paul does not soften that. There is more to Him than we have seen, and more than we will finish seeing. But the Spirit who knows those depths is the same Spirit given to ordinary believers in a struggling church in Corinth.

Paul then gives a comparison from everyday life, and it is a good one.

"For who knows a person's thoughts except their own spirit within them?"

You can be married to someone for forty years and still not know exactly what is going on inside them right now. Not because they are hiding, but because thoughts are interior. They only get out if the person lets them out. We tell each other. That is the only way any of us gets in.

"In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God."

So if we are going to know God's mind at all, it has to come the same way — from the inside, told to us. And that is what has happened. The Spirit who is inside the life of God has been given to us. The knowing does not start with our reaching. It starts with His speaking.

Verse twelve has a purpose in it that is easy to read past.

"What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us."

The Spirit was given for a reason. Not so we would feel spiritual. Not so we would win arguments about the Bible. So that we may understand what God has freely given us.

That means the gift came first. It has already been given. What the Spirit does is help us see what is already in our hands.

I find that oddly comforting, because so much of my own trouble is not that God has withheld something. It is that I am holding something and not really believing it is mine. Forgiven, but still bracing. Adopted, but still applying for the job. The Spirit's work here is not to hand us more. It is to walk us through what we already have until it registers.

And notice the contrast. The spirit of the world teaches us to read our lives by what we can prove, produce, and defend. That is a real education, and most of us have had years of it. The Spirit of God teaches a different reading of the same life.

Then comes the hard verse.

"The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit."

This is not Paul calling people stupid. He has just spent a whole chapter refusing that kind of ranking. The word he uses for the natural person means someone living by the ordinary human capacities alone — and every one of us was there.

It is more like being tone deaf to a song everyone else is moved by. The notes reach you. Nothing happens. You cannot argue yourself into hearing it.

This explains something many of us have felt. You try to describe what God has done in you to someone you love, and it lands flat. You end up feeling like you explained it badly. Maybe you did. But Paul says something else may be going on. The message is not being weighed and rejected on the evidence. It is not being received at all yet, because it is discerned only through the Spirit.

That should make us patient rather than superior. If I see anything, it is because Someone opened my eyes, and I did not do that. So the response to a friend who does not see it is not frustration. It is prayer, and staying in their life.

Paul finishes with a question borrowed from Isaiah.

"Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?"

In Isaiah, that question has one obvious answer. Nobody. No one advises God. No one has ever sat Him down and improved His thinking. The question is meant to shut our mouths.

Then Paul adds seven words that should not be possible.

"But we have the mind of Christ."

He does not say we have mastered it, or that we always use it well. The Corinthians were proof that you can have this and still behave badly. But the claim stands. Through the Spirit, believers have been given access to how Christ thinks — His values, His priorities, the way He sees people, what He counts as important.

That is not a licence to say my opinion is God's opinion. It is an invitation to let His mind reshape mine slowly, over a long time, through the Word and prayer and the people He has put around me.

The depths are open. Not because we finally got clever, but because the God who lives in them decided to speak.

If the Spirit was given so we would understand what God has freely given us, then some of what we most need today is not new. It is already ours, and we have not taken it in yet.

So it is worth asking plainly. What has God already given me that I am still living as if I do not have? Forgiveness I keep re-earning. Belonging I keep auditioning for. A promise I have read a hundred times and never let land.

And if there is a person in your life who hears all this as foolishness, take the pressure off yourself. You were not the one who opened your eyes either. Keep loving them, keep praying, and leave the seeing to the Spirit.

All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen. 🤍

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