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Paradoxes of Christian Living

2Corinthians: Paul's Most Underappreciated Epistle

Jun 23, 2019


by: Jack Lash Series: 2Corinthians: Paul's Most Underappreciated Epistle | Category: NT books | Scripture: 2 Corinthians 6:8–10

I. Introduction
 A. Philip Rice will be preaching the next three weeks.
 B. There are many paradoxes of the Christian life, things which in the eyes of the world don’t match up, don’t go together. But the mind of Christ is different than the thinking of the world. And Jesus constantly said very surprising things, things which violated the patterns of human thought.
  1. Love your enemies.
  2. If any man wants to be great, he must be the servant of all.
  3. The first shall be last
 C. Here is the 3rd part of Paul’s list of 27 descriptions of the context in which he commends the gospel.
  1. The first nine were the hardships in the midst of which he honored Christ.
  2. The second nine were fruits of the Spirit displayed in his life in the midst of the hardships.
  3. The third nine is a list of paradoxes which characterize his ministry & the Christian life.
 D. 2Cor.6:3–10 We put no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, 4 but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, 5 beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; 6 by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love; 7 by truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; 8 through honor and dishonor, through slander and praise. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; 9 as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed; 10 as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything.
  1. Three of these are synonymous. So, we’ll handle them together. That gives us six points to cover.
II. Commending the gospel “through honor and dishonor, through slander and praise” (6:8)
 A. On the one hand, Paul received much honor & appreciation in response to his gospel ministry. Folks who’d never met him before became attached to him and felt indebted to him for the rest of their lives, for he’d brought the life-giving message of hope, he’d shown them the path of freedom, forgiveness and fellowship with God. He who had been the archenemy of God’s people became their great hero.
 B. And yet, on the other hand, by those who opposed his message, Paul was treated with disdain, slander, and abuse. They went to great lengths to suppress his ministry and his message. And the opponents of Christ had a special abhorrence for Paul because they felt he had betrayed them.
 C. It should not surprise us that Paul was met with such contrasting responses. Jesus Christ was the most loved and most hated person who ever lived. His followers can expect nothing less.
 D. "If the world hates you, you know it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world,.. the world hates you...If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake." (John 15:18-21)
 E. Paul glorified Christ in the midst of honor and dishonor, slander and praise.
  1. The praise did not go to his head; the slander did not cast him into despair. His successes did not make him think too highly of himself; his failures did not make him feel useless and hopeless.
  2. (We tend to think that our struggle comes when we are dishonored or slandered. We think we’re fine when we’re honored or praised. But success and popularity can be just as dangerous or even more dangerous than humiliation.)
III. Commending the truth of the gospel when “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true” (6:8)
 A. Just because you are sincerely preaching the truth of Christ doesn’t mean you won’t be accused of being an imposter.
 B. Though Paul preached the gospel with utmost sincerity and scrupulously spoke the truth to his own peril, yet those who opposed him often accused him of speaking lies and deceiving the people.
 C. And when you’re pouring out your life and endangering your life to minister the gospel to others, it is very hard when people accuse you of being a fake.
 D. Once again, Paul is having the same experience our Lord had:
  1. He was accused of doing miracles by the power of the devil, not by the power of God (Mt.12:24).
  2. In John 7:12 some said of Him: "He leads the people astray."
  3. He was called a deceiver (Matthew 27:63).
 E. If the One who is the truth incarnate was maligned as a deceiver, it shouldn’t surprise us when the same false accusation is leveled at us. It is bound to happen to those who speak the truth of Christ.
 F. The question is: How do we handle it? Does our response to this false accusation provoke us to anger and retaliation or are we able to "turn the other cheek"? Do we follow the example of Paul, who said, “when we are slandered, we try to conciliate.”  (1Cor.4:13)?
 G. Christ commended the gospel by the way He acted when He was mistreated and reviled.
 H. When we face false accusations, we are called to commend the gospel with a response of love, kindness, humility, joy, and with unwavering confidence in the truth of Christ.
IV. Commending the gospel when you are “as unknown, and yet well known” (6:9)
 A. Paul moves to the next contrast which describes his ministry: he often is taken lightly or treated as nothing, yet he knows that He is well-known by God.
 B. Of all the human beings that walked upon the face of the earth in the day of Paul, no one deserved more recognition and honor than this great apostle.
  1. Not only was he chosen by God to be one of a select few who would be the foundation stones of Christ’s church (Eph.2:20; Rev.21:14), he also received a personal visit from the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. He was uniquely commissioned and instructed by the Lord Himself.
  2. In fact, he was even taken up to heaven (either in body or in a vision) to see and hear things "which a man is not permitted to speak." (2Cor.12:4)
  3. He wrote 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament and he is the one most responsible for the spread of Christianity in the world.
  4. He was probably the greatest Christian in history. He, of all men, was worthy of recognition
 C. And yet, though today he is one of the most well-known men of the ancient world, at the time in which he lived he was usually treated as a nobody.
  1. Speaking of the way in which he was treated, in 1Cor.4:9, 13 he describes himself and the other apostles as "men condemned to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world... we have become as the scum of the world, the dregs of all things."
  2. Even many of the Christians gave him little recognition.
   a. The Corinthian church, to which this letter was written, was failing to recognize him as deserving much respect or obedience. That’s one of the reasons this letter was written.
   b. When he was on trial in Rome for preaching he says of his friends: "all deserted me" (2Tim.4:16).
 D. Don’t you hate it when people treat you like nothing, when they act like you’re not even there, when they treat you as completely irrelevant? But when Paul was treated like a nobody, he never forgot that he was somebody to God. Though he was unknown in the world, he knew he was well-known to the One who chose Him in Christ "before the foundation of the world" (Eph.1:4).
  1. And this confidence in the face of rejection that this produced in Paul was a beautiful advertisement for the truth and power of the gospel. And the same is true for us.
 E. You see, our heavenly Father knew you before He formed you in the womb. He knows everything about you. He knows when you sit down & rise up. He knows when you go out and when you lie down; He is completely familiar with all of your ways. He even knows your thoughts. Before a word is on your tongue, He knows it completely. (Ps. 139:2-6) No matter what this world thinks of you, you are still well-known and well-loved by your Abba Father, even if unknown by others.
V. Commending the gospel as dying, and yet behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed (6:9b)
 A. Paul’s next two contrasts descriptive of his ministry have to do with dying but still living.
 B. Though from a human perspective it frequently looks like Paul is going down in defeat because of all the opposition he faces, he keeps hanging on. Remember what he said in 2Cor.4:8-11: "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; ...struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh."
  1. Satan wants us to believe that the cross will end in death, not in resurrected glory, but we know.
  2. Paul is again following the pattern of the cross. He understands that he lives in the state of dying. But while he is dying, Christ is coming more and more to life in him.
  3. All followers of Christ are called to die every day. This is what it means to carry our crosses daily and lose our lives for Christ (Lk.9:23-24). This is what it means to die to myself so that "it’s no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me." (Gal.2:20)
  4. Jesus said that the secret to saving your life is losing it. If we cling to our lives in this world and fail to trust the Lord enough to let them go, then we end up losing them.
 C. Also, when folks see that we’re not daunted by set-backs, when they see that suffering doesn’t embitter us, when they see that our happiness is not based on things going our way, when they see that there’s something that holds us up in the midst of disappointments and burdens, then we commend the gospel to them, we show them that there’s something bigger than the "light and momentary afflictions" (2Cor.4:17) that the world gets bent out of shape over.
 D. The second little phrase here is “punished, and yet not killed.”
  1. The punishment Paul is referring to here in v.9 is the Greek word for parental discipline.
  2. Paul is saying that though he gets disciplined by the Lord, it doesn’t kill him. It doesn’t even damage him. It actually gives him life!
  3. Like everybody else, we experience lots of troubles, but it doesn’t get the better of us. We know what troubles are for, and who sends them, and that they’re temporary, and that He is with us in the midst of them. So they don’t overwhelm us.
VI. Commending the gospel as sorrowful yet always rejoicing (6:10a)
 A. Perhaps the strangest paradox of all here is that Paul is sorrowful yet always rejoicing.
 B. It’s not either/or, it’s not sometimes one and sometimes the other.
 C. Strangely enough, Paul seems to be advocating a life that knows sorrow and joy at the same time.
 D. No matter how much we would prefer to be "happy, happy, happy all the time," there most definitely is godly sorrow. In fact, there are a number of kinds of godly sorrow:
  1. There is the godly sorrow of repentance (2Cor.7:11; James 4:9),
  2. of compassion (weeping with those who weep),
  3. of sadness over the sin of others (e.g. 2Cor.11:28-29, Jesus weeping over Jerusalem), etc.
  4. of losing a loved one or having to say goodbye (e.g. Acts 20:36-38).
 E. Actually, each of us has plenty of fuel for godly sorrow to keep us legitimately sorrowful constantly. In fact, none of us has enough godly sorrow. It hurts too much, so we close our hearts.
 F. Not all sorrow is godly, of course. Many things make us sad which shouldn’t make us sad.
  1. When we don’t like how we look
  2. When someone else has something we wish we had
  3. When we don’t get the attention or admiration we would like
 G. We are commanded to rejoice always and in all things. In spite of all the things that legitimately make us sad, the good news is more good than the bad news is bad; our Friend is far bigger than our enemy. And that’s enough to make us joyful, even when we’re weeping!
VII. Commending the gospel as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything (6:10b) I LOVE THIS!
 A. Paul had no money, his friends had to send him gifts so he could live, he spent a lot of his time in prison, he had no wife and (apparently) no children. Though he labored endlessly for the gospel, he didn’t even receive enough support to pay the bills. (That’s why he often had to take time away from the ministry to make tents in order to support himself – see 1Thes.2:9 and 2Thes.3:8). He knew hunger and thirst, cold and exposure, and other things commonly associated with poverty (2Cor.11:23-27).
 B. And yet Paul was rich, SPECTACULARLY rich, among the richest people on earth.
  1. First of all, he possessed the most valuable treasure the world has ever known, namely, the pearl of great price. He tells us how he (and other believers as well) acquired this treasure: "You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich." (2Cor.8:9)
  2. Second, along with this pearl he also possessed everything else in the world: "He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32) Included in this list of "all things" is "the world, ... life, ... death, ... things present, ... things to come" (1Cor.3:21–22), really big things, things the world has been trying to acquire since the beginning. 
   a. He had nothing, yet he possessed everything!
 C. And Paul was so rich that he was able to make many others rich as well. He made them rich by giving them Jesus Christ: he was "poor yet making many rich."
 D. When a person who apparently has nothing keeps giving and giving and giving, it seems apparent that the person has a storehouse you cannot see. This is the way it was for Paul. This is how it must be for us. If we have Jesus Christ, then we have a storehouse the world cannot see.
VIII. Conclusion
 A. And so it is that, like Paul, Christ’s people live lives of paradox.
 B. This is why we’re so out of step with the world. This is why they think we’re weird.
  1. Based on the normal pattern of the world, we are out of whack.
  2. We have something in our lives which changes the way we think and act.
  3. We’re kind to people who are rude to us. We don’t feel sorry for ourselves. We don’t slam people behind their backs. We have no patience for treating women as sexual objects. We won’t cheat people, even our enemies. We are compassionate toward people no one else cares about, even strangers. We are quick to accept blame. We’re worried about guarding our own hearts, not judging someone else’s. We love the Bible, we love going to church & singing God’s praises.
  4. This is a red ball: looks the same as other balls. But it acts and sounds different because there is another ball inside the ball, just like for us there is another Person inside the person. And just as you can’t see the ball inside the ball, so you can’t see this other Person inside. But you can still tell, by the impact that the inside ball has on the outside ball, and the Person inside has on the person outside. It acts differently, I keeps doing things you don’t expect, the physics are different.