No More Stumbling Blocks

The Blame Game

Often times people live in this “don’t blame me” and that often comes when they refuse to accept responsibility for their own action or inaction. Blame often gets confused with guilt because it comes from another person. When people start of with “The Reason why I didn’t” or “The Reason why I did,” or the infamous “I did this because,” the person should prepare themselves for deflection and no accountability. A person’s salvation is just that a personal decision, and we should not put for tomorrow what we can do today. Blame does nothing but prolong making a decision. “Do not be the obstacle that causes someone to miss the message.”

2 Corinthians 6 in Context

Paul shifts from a defensive posture to a commendative position and begins with reminding the church of his divine commission and authority while also asserting that what he does is God’s work, not his. Working together with God means that he sets out to accomplish God’s objectives, not his own. Paul’s objective is reconciliation. God sent Christ as his agent to make reconciliation possible. God uses ambassadors like Paul to continue that agenda—to call people to be reconciled to God, to make know that God does not count their sins against them and that God loves them and yearns for them to repent.

Yet Paul directs his call for reconciliation specifically to the Corinthians, and he implores them not to receive God’s grace in vain. The grace refers to God’s reconciling work in Christ. Paul apparently took this warning to heart himself. He wrote to the Corinthians about his call to be an apostle (1 Corinthians 15:10). He assumes that they have received God’s grace, but what would make it all for nothing? Anslem said, “He receives grace into a vacuum … who does not work with it, who does not give it his heart, and who through sloth, makes that grace ineffectual, by not doing all that he can to express it in good works.” The interpretation makes this statement an applicable warning to all Christians, but Paul has something more specific in view for the Corinthians than allowing God’s grace to produce fruit in their Christian life. “The true sign that you appreciate God’s grace is a changed life.” The admonition that follows in 6:14-17 suggests that their continuing association with idols would cause their faith to flounder on the moral rocks. It would be the failure to understand and practice the moral requirements of their faith by living a life that contradicts and rejects divine grace. To receive the grace of God in vain would be reject salvation, to fail to profit by it, to let it go to waste by not making full use of it in their lives, or to fail to live as reconciled people should.

Prioritizes the eternal decision over the opposition

Here’s a thought: There will be time enough for you to ask all proper and right questions, and to have them answered, when you have sought and found the Savior. But, meanwhile, your immortal soul is in jeopardy, so attend to that first of all. A man who is sinking in the sea is mad if he says “I won’t lay hold of that rope until I understand all about astronomy.” A man in a burning house does not need to trouble his head about geology; his first business is to get to the fire escape. He can leave his study of geology until tomorrow. So, you unconverted ones should “seek first his kingdom and righteousness,” and all other things you need shall be added unto you (Matt 6:33).

It is the time since the coming of Christ , the gospel era. It is the interval until the parousia. It is the time from Christ’s coming until his return or our own death, which is a time of opportunity as well as of responsibility. It is the eschatological now of life in Christ and in the new creation, the current age of grace in which people may become new in Christ by rebirth. It is the era of God’s good pleasure that will last until the consummation. It is the current, final phase of salvation history, the eschatological change of ages that was begun by Christ’s death. It is the critical present moment in which God’s help is still available. It is the present moment as the apex of salvation history, in which God has worked reconciliation for the world through Christ’s death and resurrection.

It is a time acceptable to God. The time is chosen and appointed by God, not by man. It is a time when people are acceptable to God, the time of eschatological opportunity. It is a time accepted by God as the right time for bringing grace to men. It is a time acceptable to God because he appointed it, but it is appointed as a time of grace to man, an opportunity for which they must answer.

It is a time favorable to man, a time of God’s favor to man, a time when God mercifully accepts man. It is a welcome time, a time of God’s good pleasure. In the first clause the time was δεκτός ‘acceptable’ to God, a time in which he mercifully heeded them, but in the second clause the present time.

The point is not about to whom the time is acceptable or favorable, but that that time is now; the day of salvation is the day when someone who needs help gets it. God has chosen the time and man is benefited by it, so it is acceptable to God and favorable to man.

Don’t restrictive hearts keep you from speaking freely

As a minister of the gospel, Paul has a clear conscious where the delivery of the gospel is concerned. So many times people use others as an excuse for rejecting the marvelous message of the gospel. Paul lists the ways they have “commended” themselves to the preaching of the gospel to them. The word “commended” is the word synistemi, meaning to provide evidence of a personal characteristic or claim through actions, demonstrate, show, bring out. How does a servant of God commend himself? The answer is in the epistle as a whole. Not by self-praise, violence, ambition, ruthlessness; not by letters of authority from any human source; but by the purity of his motives and behaviour, the sufferings he endures for the sake of others, and the wealth he is able to bring them through the Gospel. Paul and his companions faced external and internal hardships, but God kept them in all of it.

“Some preachers cannot speak freely because their hearts are closed and restricted.”

The word restricted here is stenochoreo, to confine or restrict to a narrow space. Paul says that he’s held nothing back from them and he’s spoken to the in straightforward speech. Paul’s speech and the freedom by which he spoke reflected his inward attitude. A person’s speech is reflective of one’s heart matter. Their speech reveals how much space a person has in their heart. Therein lies the danger of free speech…people don’t let us in by their actions; they let us in by their words. As a minister of the gospel, you have to accept the fact that some have closed hearts before you have an open mouth. Their love has grown cold, while he professes that he still loves them with heated passion. He has opened his heart to them; they have closed theirs, and, in effect, squeezed him out of their hearts by treating him with distrust and suspicion. If they do love him, that love is best shown by their obedience. If they refuse to accept his teaching and reproof, they have closed their hearts not only to him, but also to the Spirit.

Authentic Christianity adjusts your relational perspective

Paul makes his greatest point here in chapter 6 through vivid imagery. Paul uses an agricultural term to stress a spiritual point. He simply instructs them to not be “unequally yoked.” We use this to justify breaking off relationship with people, when the context of the scripture speaks prior to entering the relationship. The word heterozygountes, a verb meaning “other yoked.” The connotation is of animals that need different kinds of yokes, because they are of different species. Lev. 19:19 prohibited the mating of different species of cattle. Paul is warning the Christians in Corinth to not double harness themselves in an uneven team. Paul has in mind an alliance with spiritual opposites, and the image of harnessing oneself to someone who is spiritually incompatible evokes images of spiritual disaster. Those who bear Christ’s yoke (Matt. 11:30) cannot share it with others who deny Christ. Those who harness themselves with unbelievers will soon find themselves plowing Satan’s fields.

The authenticity of grace should adjust the atmosphere when you encounter unbelievers.

People often use the “authentic” self trap to continue practice their way of living, causing God’s grace to be in vain. Christ never asked you to be your authentic self, but he did ask you to be like him.

If your Christianity can’t withstand the world, then its not Christ, but its you.

Separation does not mean isolation; it means that people should be able to tell the difference between you and the world.

Paul did not ask his converts to come out of the world; he did not even ask them to abstain from non-Christian dinner parties, though he was aware that they could constitute a problem. He did not expect marriages to be broken up on the ground that only one of the partners had become a Christian; Christian and non-Christian should continue to live together. Paul warned his readers against the practice of taking part in meals in idol-shrines, and expected them to settle their own disputes without making use of non-Christian courts; and one must remember the moral break made by conversion, and the separate existence of the church as the community of God’s elect. The position was anything but simple. The Christian was in the world, but must remember that the outward shape of this world is passing away. He could not but live in the midst of unbelievers, and must live in contact with them since in this way he might hope to save them; but he himself was a member of the holy people, who would judge the world. Paul wants them to form their own spiritual identity so that they are distinguished from the pagan society surrounding them and will realign their values accordingly.