1 When I came to you, brothers, I didn't come and tell you about God's secret with rhetorical language or wisdom.

2 For while I was with you I resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

3 It was in weakness, fear, and great trembling that I came to you.

4 My message and my preaching were not accompanied by clever words of wisdom, but by a display of the Spirit's power,

5 so that your faith would not be based on human wisdom but on God's power.

6 However, when we are among mature people, we do speak a message of wisdom, but not the wisdom of this world or of the rulers of this world, who are passing off the scene.

7 Instead, we speak about God's secret wisdom that has been hidden, which God destined for our glory before the world began.

8 None of the rulers of this world understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory.

9 But as it is written, "No eye has seen, no ear has heard,and no mind has imagined the things that God has preparedfor those who love him."

10 But God has revealed those things to us by his Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the deep things of God.

11 Is there anyone who can understand his own thoughts except by his own inner spirit? In the same way, no one can know the thoughts of God except God's Spirit.

12 Now, we have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who comes from God, so that we can understand the things that were freely given to us by God.

13 We don't speak about these things in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, as we explain spiritual things to spiritual people.

14 A person who isn't spiritual doesn't accept the things of God's Spirit, for they are nonsense to him. He can't understand them because they are spiritually evaluated.

15 The spiritual person evaluates everything but is subject to no one else's evaluation.

16 For "Who has known the mind of the Lordso that he can advise him?"However, we have the mind of Christ.