Is No One Wise Enough?
1 Corinthians 6:4-6 - “So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers, but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers?”
At my house, when the bickering between the girls reaches a certain pitch, I’ve learned to hold up one hand and say a single sentence: “Does this pass the THINK test?” Olivia is twelve, Elizabeth is ten, and they know exactly what’s coming, because they’ve heard it a hundred times. “Before anything else leaves your mouth,” I say, “run it through five questions: is it true? Is it helpful? Is it inspiring? Is it necessary? Is it kind?” They groan, every time. And then, more often than not, the thing they were about to say gets left unsaid, and the fight loses its fuel.
It’s a small tool. But it’s doing something Paul reaches for in these verses and aims at a whole church.
The Corinthians had moved well past simple disagreement. They were taking their disputes public, hauling one another in front of pagan courts to be declared the winner. And Paul is almost incredulous. Is there really no one among you wise enough to settle a quarrel between brothers? You, the people of God, indwelt by the Spirit of God, and you cannot find a way to work this out at home? He calls it what it is and says it to their shame.
It’s easy to read this and feel safely off the hook, since most of us aren’t dragging fellow church members into court. But look closer at what’s happening underneath, because we do a version of it constantly. We have a grievance, and the thing we want isn’t reconciliation but vindication. So we build the case. We rehearse the argument. We take it to the group text, to the sympathetic church member, to the counselor or the corner of the internet most likely to side with us, hunting for a jury that will tell us we were right all along. And Paul’s question turns and finds us: is no one wise enough? Could it be that the wisdom to handle this has been sitting in the room the whole time, while we keep walking past it on the way to find an audience?
And notice that Paul keeps returning to one phrase: before unbelievers. The watching world was seeing the family of God unable to make it through a single argument in love, and that was its own kind of sermon, the wrong kind. People who don’t yet know Jesus are reading us all the time. They notice the person who handles a conflict with grace, who absorbs an offense without keeping score, who reconciles when every earthly reason said to escalate. That kind of restraint is almost impossible to explain, and it preaches louder than any case we could win. This is the quiet work of a Winsome Witness: someone whose ordinary way of handling a conflict makes the gospel look as real as it is.
And this is exactly where the gospel does its quiet work in us. Because we can’t summon this kind of restraint by gritting our teeth. Instead, it will grow in us when we reckon the extent to which we’ve been forgiven such a great a debt we could never repay, by a Father who declined to take us to court, who in Christ absorbed the wrong into himself rather than ruin us with it. The wisdom Paul is asking for runs deeper than any technique. It’s the family resemblance of those who have been treated that way by Christ, slowly learning to treat each other the same.
Today: Pick one live disagreement you are carrying right now, the one you’ve quietly been building a case about. Before you say another word to anyone else regarding it, run your next sentence through the five questions: is it true? Is it helpful? Is it inspiring? Is it necessary? Is it kind? If it can’t clear all five, leave it unsaid. Then take the matter to the person directly, or to the Lord, before you ever take it to another.
Prayer: “Father, you know how badly I want to be proven right, how fast I go looking for someone to take my side. Give me the wisdom You have already poured out by your Spirit, and the humility to use it before I reach for an audience. Make our church the kind of place the watching world can’t quite explain, the kind who meets conflict with the same mercy we were shown at the cross. In Jesus’ name and for His glory, Amen.”
-PK