Sermon Tone Analysis

2 CORINTHIANS 10-12

 

Last Monday I went with Rosemary and Robin Griffiths for a four hour drive out of the Thai city of Chiang Mai.

We we over a series of spectacular  mountain ranges covered in dense tropical forest.

We arrived in a tiny outpost of the Christian faith miles from anywhere important.

There on a site of  a few acres was a Bible school for tribespeople from the Burma~/Thai border region.

There were no students in residence because they were all off to  the rice planting.

When they are in residence there are about a dozen of them living in some very basic accommodation (basic to us that is).

They get  and cook their own food.

The cost to them for six months of tuition, a place to sleep, is about £8.

If these people were to hire themselves out for a  day’s labour in the fields of a Thai landowner and work for 12 hours under the merciless sun they might earn £2.

That’s 16.5 pence an hour.

I had lunch with a American couple who have worked amongst these tribal people since 1955.

Don and Janet.

Their home was simple and basic.

They are close to retirement but both are still giving themselves to Bible translation for the tribal people.

There was a godly dignity about them, a  beauty of spirit, a transparent loveliness that can only be the result of a 2 Corinthians experience.

The Christian worker dies to self-comfort and  self-protection so that the life of God might work in the tribal worker who can earn £2 a day if he’s lucky.

I looked around that home for the accumulated benefits of a lifetime’s hard work.

But I couldn’t see the fruit of their labours in the trappings of their  home.

I couldn’t see very much of what we would look for in someone’s home who we considered had been successful.

You’d have to go and look  for some of those tribal people who had come to faith in Christ and had been discipled in the Scriptures through those extraordinary people whose  reward will be in the world to come.

Eternal life has come into the hearts of Karen villagers as a godly couple have died to self to serve them.

When you meet people like this words like *power* and *prosperity* have to be understood in Biblical categories, not Western ones.

You just could not  measure success by looking at clothes, furniture, bank balances, crowds, and impressive celebrity status.

Before I went away we spent some  Sunday evenings looking at some of these issues in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.

This godly, dignified apostle had planted a church in the  heart of a pagan Greek city.

He’d supported himself by making tents with his own hands and by receiving financial help from churches in other  countries.

If you used Greek pagan categories there wasn’t much about the apostle Paul to write home about.

If you wanted to indulge in boasting  about power and prosperity then it was best not to read his CV.

The new leadership that had arisen in the Corinthian church were saying things like this about Paul - his personal presence is unimpressive, and  you’ve never heard a worse preacher.

In terms of power, personality, and presence, Paul’s a weak man.

Now, he’s spent most of this letter  addressing these criticisms.

Not because he wants to defend himself, but because these new leaders were actually attacking the very heart of the  Christian message, and in these last three chapters he takes out every big gun in his theological armoury and blasts their dangerous teaching to  bits.

I know 1st century Corinth might seem a long way from where you live and what you’re facing in your life.

But this IS important to you for this simple  reason - what Paul is dealing with in these three chapters is *how should a Christian face life*.

 

1.

BEWARE OF FALSE PROMISES (11:1-15)

 

There’s something in all of us that longs for a life of perpetual comfort, happiness and conquest over all of life’s problems.

We instinctively know that  we were made for life in Paradise, and we’d like life to be as much like the Garden of Eden as possible.

That’s why most people who play the  National Lottery do so.

They think the money will deliver them from pressures, anxieties and many of life’s problems.

In every generation religious movements arise which make big promises.

Paul calls them *boasts* in this letter - *ch. 11:16-18*.

These promises always have more to offer than God offers us in the Gospel.

But these promises of power and prosperity and problem-free living are  very attractive to us by nature.

I spent many years as a young Christian in my teens and 20’s looking for a version of Christianity which would give me  instantaneous power and victory.

Look how Paul describes this danger in *ch.11:1-4*.

An intelligent approach was made to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Somehow she was spoken to through a creature.

The suggestion was made to her  that if only she would listen to this new message she’d be better off than with the message God had revealed to her.

There’s the promise of better  wisdom, better power, and a better life if only she will follow the new leader.

And she was *seduced* It was as though she was a virgin being kept for  the day of her wedding, but she was seduced away from God into spiritual adultery.

And the promise was a false promise.

It led to spiritual disaster.

Whenever you listen to people who offer you more than God offers you in the Gospel then the end result is spiritual disaster.

That very thing was happening at Corinth.

Look at *verse 3*.

And look who’s behind it - *verse 13,14*.

The one who deceived Eve is at work still trying to seduce the minds of people like you away from the  Apostle’s message of salvation.

And they can be so attractive.

Satan comes as an angel of light.

You can’t tell a false teacher by his bad breath or his  smelly armpits, nor even by his obnoxious personality.

The false teacher will come with persuasive words.

He will be an attractive and winsome  personality, and you’ll feel that he’s a trustworthy man who has truly come with a message from God.

And he will get a large following.

Well you would  wouldn’t you if you could offer a better Gospel, Jesus and Holy Spirit experience than the apostle Paul.

A year back a man was preaching to a group of more than 200 fellow ministers in this country.

He blew on them with the breath of his mouth and they  all fell to the ground.

It is part of a movement that offers experiences of the Spirit which seem better than ones you read about in the NT.

You may remember a few years ago the American TV evangelist who appealed for millions of dollars on prime time TV in order to build a new  hospital.

His grounds for making the appeal was that a 900 foot tall Jesus had appeared to him that week and told him that if he built this hospital it  would be filled with miraculous cures.

The same man appealed for money on the grounds that the Lord had told him his life would be taken away if  the American people didn’t provide the money necessary for his ministry.

And American Christians have poured millions of dollars into that kind of  thing.

Look at the apostle’s warning in *11:15*.

It will come to nothing.

It will lead to harm, spiritual harm.

People will be disillusioned and disappointed.

People will be wounded spiritually.

They’ll will have swallowed false promises and it will lead to bitterness of spirit when those promises aren’t  fulfilled.

It’ll lead to a fractured relationship with the true God and his Word, as was the case with Eve.

 

2.

BE AWARE OF AUTHENTIC POSSIBILITIES

 

The issue of boasting is very prominent in this *11th chapter*.

Imagine it in the form of a CV.

You write off to try to impress a potential employer with  your experience of life and you write like this - *11:21-33*.

*/I was lowered in a basket from a window/*.

Don Carson reminds us that in the world of Roman military campaigns there was a special medal of  honour called the */corona muralis/*.

When a ltgcking a wallcking a walled city, the most dangerous moment in the campaign was the first wave of  troops to try to scale the wall.

They were the most likely to be wounded or killed.

There was a special medal for the soldier who was first up the wall.

Paul turns that on its head.

*/I was the first Christian DOWN the wall/*.

Here’s the great apostle in a laundry basket hanging from a rope escaping for  his life in the middle of the night.

That’s not you picture of triumph and victory is it?

It’s a picture of weakness.

Weakness.

Look at *verse 30* -  weakness.

To be an authentic Christian living in the real world is to be faced with these authentic possibilities.

One of the things which is always difficult for  someone coming back from a trip to the mission field is the problem of contrast.

You meet groups of Christian workers who are grappling with living  in difficult and discouraging situations with a great spirit of sacrifice.

I talked with a godly young couple that Neil and Viv write to.

They went with their  young children to the village in Nepal they want to work in.