1 Now when I came to you, brothers, I did not come and tell you God's uncovered secret in rhetorical language or human philosophy,
2 for I determined, while among you, to be unconscious of everything but Jesus Christ and Him as crucified.
3 Yes, as for myself, it was in weakness and fear and great trembling that I came to you,
4 and my language and the message I preached were not adorned with pleasing words of worldly wisdom, but they were attended with proof and power given by the Spirit,
5 so that your faith might not be in men's wisdom, but in God's power.
6 Yet, when among mature believers we do set forth a wisdom, but a wisdom that does not belong to this world or to the leaders of this world who are passing away;
7 rather, we are setting forth a wisdom that came from God, once a covered secret but now uncovered, which God marked off as His plan for bringing us to glory.
8 Not one of this world's leaders understands it, for if they had, they would never have crucified our glorious Lord.
9 But, as the Scripture says, they are: "Things which eye has never seen and ear has never heard, and never have occurred to human hearts, which God prepared for those who love Him."
10 For God unveiled them to us through His Spirit, for the Spirit by searching discovers everything, even the deepest truths about God.
11 For what man can understand his own inner thoughts except by his own spirit within him? Just so no one but the Spirit of God can understand the thoughts of God.
12 Now we have not received the spirit that belongs to the world but the Spirit that comes from God, that we may get an insight into the blessings God has graciously given us.
13 These truths we are setting forth, not in words that man's wisdom teaches but in words that the Spirit teaches, in this way fitting spiritual words to spiritual truths.
14 An unspiritual man does not accept the things that the Spirit of God teaches, for they are nonsense to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are appreciated by spiritual insight.
15 But the spiritual man appreciates everything, and yet he himself is not really appreciated by anybody.
16 For who has ever known the Lord's thoughts, so that he can instruct Him? But we now possess Christ's thoughts.