Verse by Verse Devotional on 2 Corinthians by Pastor Jack #2

Paul’s Greeting

1:2 " Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. "

This is Paul’s standard greeting. He uses the identical wording in five other epistles. But there is an interesting story behind it. The traditional greeting in the Greek-speaking world (which included what was at this time the Roman Empire) was CHAIREIN , which simply meant "Greetings!" Paul turned this into CHARIS , the Greek word for grace. To this he added the traditional Hebrew greeting, which was SHALOM (though since he is writing in Greek Paul uses the Greek word that translated the Hebrew SHALOM ). To say that SHALOM means peace is to say far too little. SHALOM was a wish for peace, prosperity, well-being, wholeness. So, instead of using the familiar "greetings" Paul has Christianized the greetings of the Greek world and the Hebrew world and turned them into "Grace to you - and peace - from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ."

We see here that Paul was not bound by the culture he lived in. He did not feel constrained to go along with all the norms and patterns of life around him. Just because everyone around him was doing a certain thing wasn’t necessarily enough for him to do it. He thought about the things that he was doing. He felt free to adapt the commonly accepted forms of society and make them Christian. He wanted everything to be meaningful and not empty. He strove to bring everything captive to Christ.

He did this because Christ had become everything to him. His whole life was consumed with Christ. It was no longer good enough to just do what he had always done or to do what everyone else did. It was no longer good enough just to say hello to people. He wanted to wish them the grace of God.

Lord, forgive me for how much of my life is still so much me and how little of it is Christ. So many people come into contact with me and walk away without being touched by His mighty love. Fill me with Your Spirit to such a degree that my whole life is transformed, so that everything I do is done differently because of Christ, so that even when I greet people they will be able to tell that I am a Christian, and not only a Christian, but a man FILLED with You. Help me to be willing to throw aside human approval in order to put Christ first in all things, even if I get laughed at and ridiculed. Help me, Lord, to be willing to step out of the mainstream in order to do things Your way. Help me even be willing to look like a fool for the sake of Christ.