Power and weakness
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. It involved a hard 15 hour walk through rugged territory. The husband found soon after they started that he was suffering from a fungal infection of the intestines. He had to make the whole trip with severe diarrhea. He lost two stones in a week. He did it because he wants a small Nepali tribe to have the NT in their own language. Then you come home from talking with people who are making that kind of sacrifice and face some of the petty little irritations that we Western Christians get so upset about. So many of us major on minor things and miss out on the major matters of authentic Christian discipleship.
There are so few Christians in the West who think the Lord Jesus and his Gospel are important enough to suffer for. We put severe limits on our levels of commitment. We spend large amounts of our money on creature comforts while missionaries can’t raise enough support to go to the field. We get upset over fairly small relationship issues. We seem to behave as though these kinds of hard things ought not to happen to us.
How many of us could write a CV if we were forced to describing the weakening and wounding things we had endured for the sake of our Lord Jesus and His church and Gospel. The Lord cannot be served and the Gospel cannot be taken out into the world unless real Christians are willing to expose themselves to weakness and to suffering personal loss. Those are the authentic possibilities of the real Gospel. Things will happen to you in the Lord’s service which leave you feeling weak and wounded. If you’re not ready for that then maybe you’re not ready for authentic Christianity.
3. BE AWARE OF AUTHENTIC POWER - 12:1-10
What many of us would like to aim for as a result of knowing God is such an experience of power that we never have to experience weakness again. The thought that underneath our everyday clothes might exist a spiritual Clarke Kent appeals to us. Strong, invulnerable, unshakable, immovable, impressive. That’s what we would like to be. That’s what the super-apostles were offering the congregation at Corinth. They were especially good at telling people what the Lord had said to them last night. It’s very hard to argue with someone isn’t it when they can say to you - The Lord told me.
The new church leaders at Corinth were very strong on words of prophecy, visions from God, and messages in unknown tongues. They could tell you what the Lord said to them only last night. They could tell you of some amazing experience they had while travelling down the M6 in a car. It was enough to make the ordinary church member feel very inferior indeed. But these men were under the power of God. they said.
Along comes Paul at the beginning of chapter 12 and says - Oh yes. I had a vision once. It was 14 years ago, and I can’t tell you much about it because first of all I don’t know whether I was still in or out of my body; and I heard such heavenly things that a man is surely not allowed to talk about these things. So, that was very different from the super apostles at Corinth who were completely unafraid of telling you in exact detail everything that happened to them last night in the Spirit.
Look at our Apostle’s experience :-
Power applied to pride. That’s something the new leaders didn’t seem to know much about. After his amazing heavenly experience Paul was on the edge of being led astray by pride. To keep me from exalting myself. The authentic Christian is someone who knows just how prone he is to getting proud about things that only God can do. We can all take the credit for the things that God does through us and in us. God is committed to applying his power to our pride, even if that means allowing Satan to give us a hard time - a messenger from Satan, a thorn in the flesh, was given me. It’s hard to be proud of your appearance when you’ve just fallen headlong into a muddy pool three minutes before going into the wedding reception. God allowed Paul to fall headlong into an experience which left him feeling weak and helpless. But it was to keep him humble.
Prayer applied to Problems. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. God wants us to be so aware of how weak we are without him that he puts us in situations where all we can do is cry out to him. That’s one of the reasons why the Book of Psalms is in the Bible, and why it was the prayer book of the Lord Jesus Himself. Out of the depths I cry to you, Oh God. This poor man cried and the Lord heard him. Sometimes a dark thought crosses my mind. It does so in those periods when it seems that responsibilities bigger than I am are pressing down upon me. To look out of 50 missionaries and see their faces, and to know their hearts, and to be responsible for bringing the Word of God into their situations, is all too much. It’s enough to make you go back to your bed room and cry out to God from a place of felt weakness. But a dark thought comes to me. It’d be great if I didn’t have to feel this weak all the time. If only I could this stuff from a resevoir of personal power. That would be a disaster. Prayer applied to problems, dependent, weak men and women calling out to their God for strength is authentic Christian experience.
Grace Supplied in Weakness. On a lonely hill outside a city wall a man died in abject weakness on a Roman cross. Above his head was a notice, The King of the Jews. He didn’t look much like a King at that moment. But it was the most power-filled event in history. In that moment the grace of God began to flow out of the death of Jesus into the lives of billions of men and women. Through that death grace brings us forgiveness, new life is put into dead spiritual hearts, people under God's judgement are made heirs of eternal glory. God’s grace flowing into and out of the weakness of the Lord Jesus.
God can do amazing things with people who are weak enough. A few months after John Wesley came home from America as a defeated and wounded missionary, God took hold of him, a proud and arrogent Oxford graduate, and made him into an evangelist among the working classes.
It was when Paul was at his weakest that God was at his greatest. God accomplished mighty and wonderful things through the ministry of the apostle Paul, and it was all through a man who felt terribly weak and inadequate. My competence for the Christian life and the work of the Gospel, says Paul, is through God’s grace. I stand up to preach in weakness, fear and much trembling, and God brings men and women out of darkness into marvellous light. It’s got to be a result of his gracious work through a weak man. So, I know I’m at my best when I feel my weakness and I throw myself in prayer upon my powerful God.