Sermon Tone Analysis

Knocked Down But Not Knocked Out

2 Corinthians 4:8-9

Late night phone calls rarely bring good news.

I Remember Reading about a Preacher not long ago when the phone rang in the middle of the night, waking me from a deep sleep.

Startled and groggy, he wondered who could be calling at such an hour.

It was a friend who lives in a distant state.

“I’ve got some bad news he said”

He went on to tell him about a mutual friend who lives several thousand miles away.

He is a wonderful minister of the gospel, a great man, and a tremendous evangelist.

“He had a massive heart attack an hour ago.

They say the outlook isn’t good.”

I knew he had been going through a hard time, but I wasn’t prepared for this.

The last time he saw him, he was upbeat, smiling, positive and future-focused.

Now he is in a hospital fighting for his life.

It didn’t seem possible.

The man who called said, “Son, the ways of the Lord are sometimes very strange.”

Indeed they are.

When they prayed together, the man pleaded with the Lord to spare our friend.

Then he said, “But Lord, we know you do all things well.

And we are trusting in you completely tonight.”

After he hung up, it was hard to go back to bed.

Both stayed up talking about it for a while.

That preachers friend is still alive but no one knows what to expect next.

That late-night phone call came to mind as He prepared His message from 2 Corinthians 4.

Saying ,If I could talk to my friend, he would say, “I’m definitely just a clay pot, fragile and easily broken.”

He said I’ve been thinking lately about the fragility of life.

Maybe it’s because of the flood that hit Nashville or the tornadoes that swept through this part of the country or maybe it’s because of the string of earthquakes in many places or maybe it’s because of a long list of friends battling various diseases.

Whatever the reason, it’s good to meditate on our own mortality from time to time.

We all die sooner or later.

When Pat Conroy wrote South of Broad, he included this sobering description of how death is woven into our existence from our earliest days:

The moment you are born your death is foretold by your newly minted cells as your mother holds you up,

then hands you to your father, who gently tickles the stomach where the cancer will one day form,

studies the eyes where melanoma’s dark signature is already written along the optic nerve,

touches the back where the liver will one day house the cirrhosis, feels the bloodstream that will sweeten itself into diabetes, admires the shape of the head where the brain will fall to the ax-handle of stroke, or listens to your heart, which,

exhausted by the fearful ways and humiliations and indecencies of life, will explode in your chest like a light going out in the world.

Death lives in each one of us and begins its countdown on our birthdays and makes its rough entrance at the last hour and the perfect time (p.

10).

In a deep sense, we are all born dying.

We are born saying hello, and the rest of life is one long goodbye.

That thought, reinforced by the late night phone call, leads to a deeper truth.

The way we respond to the trials of life reveals a great deal about the strength of our Christian faith.

If we deny our troubles, or if we give in to anger or bitterness, or if we blame others for our problems, we miss what God intends to teach us through what happens to us.

It is a great advance spiritually to be able to say, “I believe God has allowed this difficulty for my good and his glory.”

We are all born dying.

In verses 8-9 2 Corinthians 4:8-9, Paul makes four statements that describe how Christians respond to the trials of life.

Another way of Putting it is’

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.

These four statements describe the true condition of believers in the world.

1.

They are always true, even though our experience of them varies.

2. We are not always pressured, but we often are.

3. We’re not always perplexed, but it happens more than we think.

4. We do not always face opposition, but sometimes we do.

And not every day are we struck down by the circumstances of life, but it does happen to all of us eventually.

No one is exempt from these things.

1. Pressure will not defeat us.

“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed” ( 2 Corinthians 4: 8 ).

The word “pressed or Troubled ” was sometimes used for walking through a crowd where people surround you and literally press against you.

G2346 θλίβω thlibo (thliy'-ɓō) v.

1. to compress.

2. to squeeze.

3. to press hard.

4. (passively) to be hard pressed.

5. to pinch.

6. (figuratively) to press in against, to crush (in a crowd).

{literally or figuratively}

[akin to the base of G5147]

KJV: afflict, narrow, throng, suffer tribulation, trouble

See also: G5147

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θλίβω (thlíbō | thlee'-bo)

Derivation: akin to the base of G5147;

Strong's: to crowd (literally or figuratively)

KJV: —afflict, narrow, throng, suffer tribulation, trouble.

See: G5147

Cognate Group: G2346 (afflict), G2347 (afflicted)

Variants: θλίβω

Hebrew Equivalents: אָיַב, חָלַץ, יְמִינִי, כֹתֶרֶת, לָצֹון, מָשַׁךְ, עָשַׁק, צוּף, צַר, צָרַר, רָעַץ, שָׁבַר

Other Resources: Thayer LSJ VGNT CWD GrLNT

AV Occurrences (10 Instances, 9 Words)

narrow (1)

Matt 7:14

they should throng (1)

Mark 3:9

we be afflicted (1)

2Cor 1:6

we are troubled (1)

2Cor 4:8

we were troubled (1)

2Cor 7:5

suffer tribulation (1)

1Thes 3:4

them that trouble (1)

2Thes 1:6

who are troubled (1)

2Thes 1:7

afflicted (2)

1Tim 5:10; Heb 11:37

Or we may think of grapes in a winepress.

The pressures of life may squeeze us but we are not utterly crushed.

Here are some ways this phrase has been translated or paraphrased:

We are not always pressured, but often we are.

“We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed” (NLT).