2 Corinthians 1-4
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Paul’s letters!
2 Corinthians is truly written as a letter… almost like a story written from Paul’s perspective to the church. Although sometimes his message can feel redundant (especially when you have to listen to it from me each day…), it really should be symbolizing just how important that message truly is. We shouldn’t necessarily be finding new ideas each day, because the ideas should be and are consistent throughout the whole Bible! We should, however, be finding new ways to take that message and apply it to our own life.
The main message that I took from Paul in these chapters is how this mission that I have been touching on this past week isn’t one that we do alone or on our own strength. Our mission is one that is fueled by God. Our words, our actions, and our endurance related to spreading the message of hope and Christ’s resurrection has nothing to do with ourselves. THANK GOODNESS.
However, that mission is carried out by us. In these chapters we are called to comfort, to conduct ourselves in purity, to forgive, to love, and to be bold in our faith walk. All these ideas require us to act on the experience of grace that we have received from God. When we carry out these things we can do so with the competence from God (3:5), which means that we aren’t responsible for making things up about grace! We do not have to distort God’s message (in fact you shouldn’t) for people to come to Christ. We have to tell people about Christ and let his life do the talking!
Paul recognized that this mission wasn’t easy, he lived through the difficulties of telling people about Christ. He talks about the importance of spreading joy among believers and keeping the body built up by reaffirming people in love (2:5-8). He reminds the church of these things because he knows how Satan works, and knows that without joy and love, the Church will be weak (2:11).
To build the church up, Paul closes with some fantastic verses that I want to reiterate here:
“Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (4:16-18).
Being a Christian is hard. Being a Christian in 2020 is hard. But we know that everything that is hard in this current life will be nothing compared to the glory and joy that is the Kingdom. That doesn’t change the fact that life is still hard, but it should change the way we handle this life and give us some joy and love to spread, even when the world is lacking.
No matter where you are in life today, remind yourself about the hope, grace, and joy you have in Christ. And when someone asks you why you are still smiling despite the chaos, tell them the truth about who gave you that kind of joy.
-Sarah Blanchard Johnson
Today’s Bible reading passage can be read or listened to at BibleGateway here – 2 Corinthians 1-4
Tomorrow we will continue with 2 Corinthians 5-9.
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