2 Corinthians 10–11

0:00 I imagine many of you, like me, watched at least part of the coronation of King Charles III of the United Kingdom yesterday. Now, I didn't, like some of the friends that I talked to, get up at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning to watch it at 6 a.m., but I did set the YouTube TV to record it, and when I woke up, kind of made it, just, you know, made an afternoon of it that afternoon, watching three or four hours of it. It was a really extraordinary thing. If you saw it, you know that. If you didn't see it, then you need to know it really was an extraordinary thing.

0:31 It was an extraordinary event just in itself because we haven't seen the coronation of a British monarch for 70 years now. So most of us sitting in this room, the vast, vast majority of us have not seen this kind of thing in our lifetimes. There might be five or ten of you who would have been, you know, born at the time that Queen Elizabeth II was coronated. It was an extraordinary event just as history. It was also an extraordinary event in what happened during the coronation. I mean, it was just filled with pomp and circumstance and robes and golden carriages and bright red, white, and blue.

1:07 It was full of regal splendor from start to finish. I think nobody does regal splendor quite like our British cousins. They do it well. But one of the things that struck me as I watched the ceremony, And one of the things that I know struck a lot of people is that in the midst of the regal splendor and in the midst of all the glory of it, there was this streak of humility that ran through the entire ceremony. Did you notice that? There were times throughout the ceremony when even the king himself was brought to a point of humility.

1:42 There was a time when he walked up to the altar of Westminster Abbey, for instance, and he knelt down and he was stripped of all the regal clothes until really he was just down to his white tunic. bed clothes essentially in front of billions and billions of people. I'm guessing not many of you have been seen by billions of people in your pajamas. King Charles III has. Did you notice the chair that he sat on as they put the crown on his head and all the other instruments of royalty? Did you see it? It had some velvet on the sides of it and on the seat but for the most part that chair which is something like seven or eight hundred years old looked like a wreck. It looked like something that someone had picked up out of a garage sale somewhere in southern United States it's broken it's cracked there's no paint on it there's no veneer on it and if you if you looked at it closely because of the way you know tv is so clear these days on our digital televisions you can see that on the back of the chair and on the you know the sort of the the back of it and the

2:44 other back there there's graffiti on the chair where school boys from the 18th and 19th centuries at the west westminster school there in the abbey carved their initials into it i noticed that one of the biggest initials on the chair right there in the center right next to the king's head was jg i wondered which of my three children put that in there famously on the seat that was covered up with velvet where the king sat one of the most famous inscriptions on that chair was one that reads p abbott a b b o t t p ab so philip abbott paul abbott something like that p abbott slept in this chair on the night of the fifth and sixth of july 1,800. King Charles was sitting on that little boy's signature and boast as he was crowned.

3:41 You know, the moment in that ceremony that's supposed to be the most regal, the moment in that ceremony that's supposed to be the grandest, is when they put the crown on King Charles's head. It's a big moment. The choir is singing, and everybody's watching, and he's covered up in gold and he has all of these implements that they continue to give to him. It's a regal moment. But the thing that kept going through my head is that as they invest the king with all of these symbols of authority, one of the things that it seems they're doing is they place all this authority and all this power in his hands is that they're filling up his hands with so much stuff that he's not going to be able to use it very well. They take a big gold robe that must weigh 20 pounds and they put it on his shoulders to weigh him down and then they take a five pound crown and put it on his head and you can see his head kind of lower. They weigh him down with so many symbols of authority that he's not going to be able to use it all that effectively to hurt anybody.

4:48 There's humility that ran through all of that royal dignity. Why do we like that? Why do we like it when those who have the most dignity, when those who are the most gifted, when those who are the most privileged show humility? Why do we like that? We like it in our sports stars too, don't we? Even here in America. We don't have a king. We don't have anything quite like a king. But we do have sports stars. And even in our sports stars, even these people who are just machines of physical health and ability, we like it when they say humble things.

5:28 That wasn't me. It was the team. I'm just glad to be here. Why do we like humility in our heroes? Well, that's part of what we're going to be talking about as we turn to the book of 2 Corinthians today. Take a Bible if you've got one. turn over to page 968. That is if you're using one of these red pew Bibles. I don't know where it's going to be if you have your own Bible. But we're going to be looking at two chapters of the book of 2 Corinthians today as we continue our study of this book. If you've been here throughout this series, you kind of know the backstory of this. It's a letter actually, not a book, written by the Apostle Paul in about the year A.D. 55. So you're talking 1980 or so years ago, something like that. Paul wrote it to a church that he had planted some five years earlier in the Roman port city of Corinth. It was a fabulously wealthy city, it was a fabulously influential city, and Paul for the last year or so before he wrote this letter had been in a big conflict with them. A minority of the church, it seems, had turned on Paul and decided that he wasn't impressive enough, he wasn't

6:33 worthy enough to be their apostle. And so that minority in the church turned on him and just declared to the rest of the church that Paul's not good enough. We should find ourselves another leader. There was some back and forth between Paul and the Corinthians about all of this, and this letter, 2 Corinthians, was written at a point when Paul got some good news from them. He got some good news that most of the church had decided to repent of their rejection of him and return to him in good faith, accept him as their apostle. And so he writes 2 Corinthians in order to thank them for that, rejoice with them in their repentance, and then ultimately, like we saw last week to ask them to be a part of this collection that he was taking up to send to the famine-wracked church in the city of Jerusalem. Paul had lots of reasons for that, but that's one of the main reasons that he writes this letter. Well, we've come today to the last major section of the book, chapters 10 through 13. You remember where we've been for the first nine chapters? Basically, Paul has been working up to the big ask that we saw last week in chapter 9, which was to push on

7:37 this Corinthian church with all of their wealth, with all their dignity, with all of their influence to be part of this collection that he was taking up. So he celebrated their repentance in the first few chapters. He defended his own apostleship a little bit against the minority of the church that was still against him. And then he finally made this plea in chapter 9, which ends with Paul casting a vision and saying to them, essentially, think about all the good that's going to come from you giving money to this collection. You're going to heal any rift that might be opening up between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians.

8:11 You're going to be helping relieve the needs of the poor and the famine-stricken in Jerusalem. And also, you're going to be kind of putting a down payment on the great reward that you're going to get in eternity because God rewards a cheerful giver. And he says not only that, but when the Jerusalem church receives your gift, they're going to rejoice in you. They're going to rejoice in the Lord. They're going to pray for you. And it's going to be wonderful when you do this. So thank God and praise God for his inexpressible gift. That's how chapter 9 ends.

8:43 It's all happy. It's all good. Everything is back where it ought to be at the end of chapter 9. And then you get chapter 10, which makes such an abrupt transition from chapter 9 that people have actually wondered if chapters 10 to 13 even actually belong to this letter. Or if 10 to 13 have maybe been tacked on from somewhere else. Some have even wondered, you remember the story of Paul sending what they call the severe letter, right?

9:14 His letter that caused the Corinthians tears and that ultimately he was very worried about it, but ultimately it brought them to repentance to him. The severe letter, it worked mostly. You remember that part. Some people have wondered if chapters 10 through 13 are actually the whole or a part of that severe letter that he sent. And the reason they think that is because the nice, conciliatory, happy, joyful, forward-looking Paul of chapter 9 is completely gone, starting in chapter 10. And in this chapter, Paul opens up a total warfare against those in the church who were opposing it.

9:51 So once you get to chapter 10, the language of the book is no longer careful and delicate. It is thunderously straightforward. He's not being conciliatory anymore. He's not thanking them for their repentance. What he's doing is calling these false teachers onto the carpet. Calls them straight up followers of Satan in this chapter. So what's going on with it? I mean, why do you have this abrupt transition from 9 to 10? I mean, you've got the guess by some scholars that it's a sort of different letter that just got tacked on to this one at some point in the hundreds of years that have passed.

10:26 Probably not. I mean, there's enough continuity, actually, of language and themes and all the rest between, you know, 1 through 9 and then 10 through 13 that we're, you know, it's certain that we're dealing with the same letter. This is not a tack on. Another guess, though, is that it is the same letter. It's meant to be the same letter. And Paul is just kind of opening up a new section of it, right? He's changing his audience, so to speak, or changing the thing that he wants to say to his audience. So it's, you know, thank you, thank you, thank you, rejoice, rejoice, please give money to my collection. And now I'm going to slam you for still having these false teachers among you.

11:00 And maybe, it certainly is a new section. But I don't know that just opening up a new section of the letter quite explains it. Because Paul's emotional state is so different from 9 to 10. So what explains it? Well, the best explanation, I think, lies in the fact that ancient letters were often written over months. With an ancient letter, you didn't always just sit down and write the whole thing out like you and I do, an email, right? Even a long email. We'll sit down generally and spend an hour on it, and we'll be very careful with the language if we got to write a long email, but we'll basically write the whole email over the course of a day or maybe two days, right? That's how we do things.

11:41 Not in the ancient world. In the ancient world, you would take a piece of paper and you'd start writing to somebody in another city and you would know that this letter doesn't just shoot through the wires and get to them immediately. You have to give it to somebody, put it on a ship, it's got to go across the ocean. That would take weeks or months. You'd have to wait on that person to reply. And so you would put a lot of information over a lot of time into one of these letters. You might write a few paragraphs of it, right, and tell them what's going on in your life and in your affairs. And then you might leave the letter alone for days or weeks or even months. And then you would come back to it a little bit later and add some other stuff. Or maybe word would come from the recipient about something going on in their affairs, and you would respond to that in the letter that you're writing. And finally, when you decided that, you know, it was time, you would roll it up in a scroll or whatever they did, put a seal on it, and you'd send it off to the recipient. Well, that's my best guess as to what has happened here. My best guess is that over a lot of time, Paul wrote chapters 1 through 9 with the goal of getting the Corinthians to participate in the collection.

12:42 That was the one thing that he wanted to do. And then he sort of sat on the letter for a while. For what reason, we don't know. Maybe it was travel. We're not sure. But at any rate, he seems to have sat on the letter. And at that point, it looks like, anyway, this is all speculation, but it looks like maybe some news came from Corinth that made Paul realize that these false teachers still had a bunch of influence there that he didn't want them to have. And so he sits down here and writes 10 through 13, seals it up, and sends it to Corinth. That's my best guess as to what happens.

13:14 There's not a lot in the Bible that explains it to us. There's certainly nothing in the text itself that tells us that's what happened. So it's a big maybe. And ultimately, I don't know. I think, you know, when I have a chance to sit down with Paul in heaven, that's one of the things I'm going to ask him. So what's the deal with 10 through 13 of 2 Corinthians? Can you please explain that to me? And I assume he will. Well, at any rate, what he does in these chapters that seem so strange at the end of this book is just make a scorching assault on those in Corinth who were questioning his apostleship.

13:45 We're going to look at two chapters of it today, chapters 10 and 11. So let's read it. 2 Corinthians chapter 10, I'm going to start reading in verse 1. He says there, I, Paul, myself, entreat you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ. I who am humble when face to face with you, but bold toward you when I am away, I beg of you that when I am present, I may not have to show boldness with such confidence as I count on showing against some who suspect us of walking according to the flesh. For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh.

14:19 For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. and we take every thought captive to obey Christ being ready to punish every disobedience when your obedience is complete look at what's before your eyes if anyone is confident that he is Christ let him remind himself that just as he is Christ so also are we for even if I boast a little too much of our authority which the Lord gave for building you up and not for destroying you I will not be ashamed I do not want to appear to be frightening you with my letters for they say his letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak and his speech of no account. Let such a person understand that what we say by letter when absent, we do when present. Not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves, but when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they are without understanding.

15:15 But we will not boast beyond limits, but will boast only with regard to the area of influence God assigned to us, to reach even to you. For we are not overextending ourselves as though we did not reach you. For we were the first to come all the way to you with the gospel of Christ. We do not boast beyond limit in the labors of others, but our hope is that as your faith increases, our area of influence among you may greatly be enlarged so that we may preach the gospel in lands beyond you without boasting of work already done in another's area of influence. Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.

15:50 For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends. I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me, for I feel a divine jealousy for you since I betrothed you to one husband to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, You put up with it readily enough.

16:23 Indeed, I consider that I'm not in the least inferior to these super apostles. Even if I am unskilled in speaking, I am not so in knowledge. Indeed, in every way, we have made this plain to you in all things. Or did I commit a sin in humbling myself so that you might be exalted because I preached God's gospel to you free of charge? I robbed other churches by accepting support from them in order to serve you. And when I was with you and was in need, I didn't burden anyone. for the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied my need. So I refrained and will refrain from burdening you in any way.

16:57 As the truth of Christ is in me, this boasting of mine will not be silenced in the regions of Achaia. And why? Because I do not love you, God knows I do. And what I am doing, I will continue to do in order to undermine the claim of those who would like to claim that in their boasted mission they work on the same terms as we do. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.

17:29 Their end will correspond to their deeds. I repeat, let no one think me foolish, but even if you do, accept me as a fool, so that I too may boast a little. What I am saying with this boastful confidence, I say not as the Lord would, but as a fool. Since many boast according to the flesh, I too will boast. For you gladly bear with fools being wise yourselves. For you bear it if someone makes slaves of you or devours you or takes advantage of you or puts on airs or strikes you in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that. But whatever anyone else dares to boast of, I am speaking as a fool.

18:02 I also dare to boast of that. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one. I'm talking like a madman. With far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes lest one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked. A night and a day I was adrift at sea. On frequent journeys in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the sea, danger from false brothers.

18:39 In toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night. In hunger and thirst, often without food. In cold and exposure and apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak and I am not weak? Who is made to fall and I am not indignant? If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, he who is blessed forever, knows that I am not lying. At Damascus, the governor under King Aratas was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me.

19:10 But I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands. He goes on into chapter 12, and we'll look at the end of this boastful, you know, speech that he's making here in chapter 11. We'll look at that next week. But today we're going to look at chapter 10 and chapter 11, which gets us about halfway through his speech. You can tell as I started reading chapter 10, you can feel the change in tone, can't you? I mean, it's no longer this kind of, please help me with this collection that I'm taking up.

19:41 It's more like, these guys are from Satan, and you should not listen to them at all. It's an extraordinary piece of writing, too, just kind of ancient writing, because it's full of rhetorical devices and rhetorical tactics that you really don't catch Paul using all that often. So there's this kind of biting sarcasm that runs through the whole thing. Things like, you know what? You're right. You're totally right. I'm weak. I don't yell at you.

20:12 I don't slap you around. I don't tyrannize you. I don't abuse you. You're right. I'm too weak to do all of those things that these false teachers are doing to you. Too weak, he says, to treat you like junk like they do. There's that kind of biting sarcasm. Then you've got this whole section, of course, in 11, goes on into 12 as well, where Paul has a really hard time doing it. But he finally just kind of bites the bullet and does it. He says, okay, okay, okay, fine. You seem to be super impressed by these super apostles who have been boasting to you about all their accomplishments.

20:47 So you want me to boast about how awesome I am? Fine. I will act like a fool. I will act like a madman. I'm not doing this on my own authority or I'm not doing it on the Lord's authority. This is not what Jesus would do. But, okay, I'm going to do it. Here we go. This is stupid. I feel like a madman doing it. You remember how he kind of interrupts himself over and over again to say, this is so dumb. But he says, I'm going to do it. This is apparently what you're convinced by, so I'm just going to boast like they do. I am awesome because I've been whipped and stoned and caned and shipwrecked over and over and over and over.

21:27 That's why I'm awesome. I mean, you see, there's just layer after layer of irony in that. It's like, I'm going to boast. I'm going to boast. This is so dumb. I'm going to boast. But here we go. What I'm going to boast in is that I get beat up a lot. I'm a wimp. Like the schoolyard bullies take me out over and over. Again, just layer on layer of irony there. They want him to boast. And he says, okay, I'll do it. But then the case that he makes is about his weakness, not his accomplishments. He pretends in these chapters to play their game, but then turns the whole thing on its head in order to make his point.

22:00 And the point that he's making in all of this really is the main idea of this text. Here it is. No matter what God may accomplish through you or in you. No matter what God may accomplish through you or in you. Your only boast should be that you belong to Christ. No matter what God may accomplish in you or through you. Your only boast should be that you belong to Christ. In fact, that can be your only boast.

22:34 Two points to the sermon, looking at each one of these chapters. You've got first Paul's boast in the Lord, and then Paul's boast in his weakness. Paul's boast in the Lord, that's what we're going to look at in chapter 10, and then Paul's boast in his own weakness in chapter 11. So point number one, Paul's boast in the Lord. So obviously here in chapter 10, we've already talked about this, there's a huge change of tone in the way Paul talks. And one of the most notable features of this whole section, really, 10 through 11, is its focus on this idea of boasting, right?

23:04 You heard that word at least 11 times in these two chapters as we read them just a minute ago. It's an interesting focus to have in these chapters because boasting, I think, to us is something that kind of sounds immediately bad. Like you just, you know it and I know it. you shouldn't boast. And we expect that of our sports heroes. We even expect it of a king who's just been crowned, right? I mean, can you imagine if King Charles, instead of marching, you know, down the aisle after he's been crowned to the strains of Elgar, if they just had some kind of party song on and he's going, yeah, yeah, let's go. You know, I'm sure he did that later that night at some party. But in that moment, what the world needed to see was not the king celebrating himself and boasting at his accomplishment. What the world wanted to see was a king being humbled.

23:50 Boasting, we know, is bad. You're not supposed to do it. It sounds conceited. It sounds inappropriate. When your kids do it to their brothers and sisters and friends after a sports game, you tell them that's not appropriate. But here's what I want you to see. Like so many other things that just exist sort of like, you know, the fumes of an empty gas tank in our society that has borrowed so much from Christian ethics, This negative opinion of boasting that's been kind of hardwired into us is there because we have chapters of the Bible like these.

24:27 It's not just a natural thing to think of boasting as negative. We've learned a negative opinion about boasting from the Bible. And it's held on, even as Christian truth has been leaking out of our culture for decades. We have a negative opinion of boasting, but it wasn't like that in ancient Greece and Rome. In fact, one of the things in ancient Greece and Rome that you had to do, in fact, that you were expected to do, especially if you were a teacher like Paul, is to get students to attach themselves to you as disciples, as students.

25:06 And the reason you wanted that is because once they attached themselves to you as a disciple, they had to pay a fee for your teaching. And the way you got students to come to you as a teacher rather than to some other teacher was boasting. You talked about yourself. You compared yourself to the other teachers in the city. And you tried to get students to come to you instead of them. You talked yourself up. And you had to in order to make a living. So you boasted about your family. You boasted about your pedigree. You boasted about your race and your accomplishments and your military service, if you had any.

25:36 You boasted about your intellect and who your teachers were and the books that you've read. The whole idea was to try to get people to want to learn from you. And as a center of culture and commerce in the Roman Empire, the people of Corinth would have been well acquainted with this whole custom. They knew about it. Likely many of them had done it themselves. And apparently one of the objections, therefore, that the false teachers made about Paul was that he never did that.

26:08 He just never did it. He never talked himself up. He never boasted. He never compared himself to any other teachers. He just didn't do it. And so what they did when they noticed that is that they started to make a case against him that the reason he didn't do it was because Paul had nothing to boast about. He had no reasons to give for why the Corinthians should have wanted to accept him as their teacher, much less as their apostle. So that's what Paul takes on, starting in chapter 10. If you look down through there, you can see how he does it.

26:40 The paragraph divisions, I think, make it a little hard to see. But chapter 10 really has two sections. It divides neatly into two sections. In verses 1 through 11, Paul is just taking on from several different angles the charge that he's super bold in his letters, but kind of wimpy and unimpressive in person. That's what he takes on in 1 through 11. Then he turns in 12 through 18 and kind of lays out his case for why actually he has every right to boast about the Corinthians themselves. He's not an intruder. He's not an interloper. He didn't just show up from the outside. He actually planted the church under his own charge from the Lord. And he has every right, therefore, to be the Corinthians apostle. That's what he presses in 12 through 18. And he comes to this, we'll talk about the details of that more in a minute, but he comes to this wonderful crescendo at the end in 17. Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord. And in 18, he says it doesn't matter if people commend themselves. What matters is who the Lord commends and how. So those are the two sections. Let's look at what he says in

27:46 a little more detail. As chapter 10 opens, you can see really clearly his opponent's first charge against Paul there in verse 1. He says, I, Paul, myself, entreat you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ. And then that sentence picks up again in verse 2. I entreat you, I beg of you, you know, and he's basically saying there not to make me have to be bold when I come to you. I'm expecting to have to have great confidence and boldness with some of these people. That's what I'm expecting. But please don't make me do it to all of you. So that's his entreaty.

28:16 That's his beg. But right in the middle of it, he says, I entreat you by the meanness and gentleness of Christ. And then there's this thing that's set off by the two dashes there. I, who am humble when face to face with you, but bold towards you when I am away. Now, what you've got to understand about that is that that is not Paul's own opinion of himself. That's not what he's saying. He's not saying, I am, in fact, humble when I'm with you, but bold when I'm away from you. That's what his opponents are saying about him, and he's being sarcastic about it.

28:49 He's quoting them in this kind of sarcastic way. They're saying that this guy, Paul, can write a good letter. You give him a pen and some paper, and he'll light you up. But you get him face to face, and he's completely unimpressive. He's meek. He's weak. He's humble and not in a good way. I mean, you can see the same thing, and it kind of nails down that that's the case in verse 10. chapter 10 verse 10 see that for they say that's the false teachers that's his opponents they say his letters are weighty and strong but his bodily presence is weak and his speech of no account so when he says that up in verse 1 he's not talking about his own opinion of himself he's talking about about theirs and honestly if you think about it if you kind of think about the story of what's happened here between Paul and the Corinthians it wasn't a totally crazy thing for them to say about him.

29:41 I mean, think about it from the Corinthians perspective. Think about what they knew of Paul, especially during the time of this conflict that they'd been having. In recent months, what had happened? Well, Paul had written 1 Corinthians at the beginning of the conflict, right? They had written him first, asked some questions. He writes 1 Corinthians back. He's got some bad news about Corinth, and so he addresses the bad news. But in 1 Corinthians, Paul is incredibly bold with them. He says that when he comes to them, when he makes his next visit, he's going to discipline them. He's going to set things right in that church. He's going to exercise all of this apostolic authority to nail them. He even threatens some of them that they're going to be excluded from the kingdom of God if they continue to behave the way that they're behaving.

30:27 He's incredibly bold. But when he got there for this emergency visit that we've talked about, He hadn't set things right, not even close to it. The trip was a disaster. He'd been opposed to his face by somebody in the church. He had left abruptly without dealing with that. And then instead of visiting them again to do what he promised he was going to do in disciplining them, he had written another harsh, bold letter to them instead of coming back.

31:02 I mean, it's no wonder his opponents were saying, this guy can write a good letter. We've got 1 Corinthians promising all this discipline. We've got the severe letter promising all this stuff. But man, when he was here, we kicked his tail. It's no wonder they were saying he can write a good letter. But when he comes in person, he's just not all that impressive. Well, Paul's answer to all that is really two things. One of those answers comes in just a phrase there in verse 1. You see that? I entreat you, he says, by the meekness and gentleness of Christ.

31:36 By the meekness and gentleness of Christ. That's how I entreat you. That's how I beg you. It is with the meekness and gentleness of Christ. Meekness and gentleness are interesting words to use in this context. They're not interesting in the sense that they mean something different from what they mean to you. They mean exactly what you think they mean. but what's interesting is that neither of those words meekness or gentleness was seen by the romans as a virtue it just wasn't if you went to the coronation of a roman emperor you wouldn't see a whole lot of displays of humility if you went to a triumph of a roman emperor you wouldn't see any displays of humility except the guy standing in the back of the chariot going thou art but a man thou art but a man thou art but a man that was it and nobody heard that except the the guy himself who was being celebrated.

32:23 What the Romans wanted was not meekness and gentleness. It was strength and boldness and dignity. So by referencing the meekness and gentleness of Christ, Paul was immediately turning the Corinthians value system on its head. He was saying, they're telling you that what you want and what you need is a strong, bold, imperial leader. You need a king. But Paul says, but you've already got one. It's Jesus, and what marks him is not harshness, but meekness and gentleness.

33:00 Now, that's a great point to just stop and consider for a second. What do you expect and want from Christian leaders? Now, what kind of men are you drawn to for spiritual leadership? I mean, is the only thing that you look for men who are just obviously strong and bold and dignified? Is that all you look for? It's not necessarily wrong to say that we want our spiritual leaders to be strong and bold and dignified.

33:38 And Jesus was those things, and it showed. Paul says that elders ought to be dignified men, able to teach so that they can protect the flock of God from wolves. Strong and bold and dignified aren't bad things. But what Paul is saying here is that even in the midst of all that, even in the midst of Jesus even showing strength and boldness and dignity at times, Jesus was ultimately marked by meekness and gentleness. By a desire not to exalt himself, but to use the authority that he had.

34:12 To use the power that he had to do good to those around him. Friend, if you aspire to be an elder, what you need to do above all is cultivate that kind of character. A character that's not looking to make a name for yourself, but rather to do good to others. Have you ever taken a look at the qualifications that this same Apostle Paul would write in 1 and 2 Timothy? Qualifications for elder.

34:43 He writes them all down. And what you'll notice if you look at those qualifications is that almost every single one of them, with one exception, is not about what an elder can do. It's not about his abilities. It's about his character. Who he is. The one thing that Paul says in those qualifications that an elder has to be able to do, I guess it's two things really. is manage his household well and therefore the household of God. You've got to be able to manage well, and you've got to be able to teach. But other than that, there are a dozen other things that have nothing to do with what an elder does, but everything to do with his character.

35:22 Do you want to be an elder someday? Do you think God has called you or appointed you to ministry? The studies are important. Building up the ability to counter error and to teach truth is important. But it's no more important than building the kind of character that reflects the character of Jesus. For the next few verses there, Paul just goes on to say that the charge that he's weak and unimpressive in person isn't true anyway.

35:56 I mean, yeah, it's true that what the Corinthians have seen so far of him is his meekness and gentleness that's modeled on Jesus. But he says, look, when push comes to shove, I can hold my own. If you want to argue with me, if you want to take me on about the ideas of the gospel, I'll go toe-to-toe with you, he says. He says he does it not by sheer force of will, but rather by reason. Look with me at verse 3. So verse 2, he says, I beg you, don't make me be as confident as I expect to have to be with some of these people. Verse 3, for though we walk in the flesh, in other words, yeah, I'm a man.

36:29 I'm in the flesh, right? I'm not some angel that's come down from heaven. We do walk in the flesh. But, he says, we are not waging war according to the flesh. The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. And we take every thought captive to obey Christ. Being ready to punish every disobedience when your obedience is complete. It's a fascinating language because basically what Paul does there in 3 to 5 is he kind of follows the steps of ancient siege warfare.

37:03 He's clearly in a warfare kind of frame of mind here. And in ancient siege warfare, what you would do is first destroy the fortress, right? Take down its walls. Then, like Paul says first there, we destroy arguments. Then we take every thought captive. So after the fortress is destroyed, then you take captives of the fighting men. And then finally, once you've got control of the whole thing, you punish, you judge, you mete out justice. That's how ancient siege warfare worked, and that's what Paul says he does, though not with people, but rather with arguments and ideas and thoughts.

37:35 You see that? Verse 3, we're not waging war according to the flesh. The weapons of our warfare are not of flesh, but they have divine power first to destroy strongholds. We destroy, and what he means by that is arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. And then we take every thought captive to obey Christ. So any ideology that's out there, we try to take it captive to obey Christ. And then finally, verse 6, we're ready to punish every disobedience. When your obedience, O Corinthians, is complete.

38:08 When you finally repented, when you finally reconciled with me, when we are back together, then I'm going to start meting out justice to these people who have opposed me so falsely. I think there's a couple of important things here for Christians to see. One of the things that I want you to see here from these verses is that Christianity is not just a mystical thing. We are not here, finally, as Christians, merely because we felt something.

38:39 We're not here as Christians. We don't say that we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ simply because we had some experience. We are here as Christians, we make our profession as Christians because we are convinced by reason and history that Jesus actually got up from the dead. That's why we're here. Other religions in the world are not based on that kind of history. Other religions in the world are based on all kinds of other things, either philosophical thinking or ethical thinking or a mystical experience by someone in the past.

39:12 Not Christianity. It is not based on feelings. It is not based on philosophy. It's based on fact and history. Jesus got up from the dead just as much as George Washington was the first president of the United States. He got up from the dead just as much as Caesar crossed the Rubicon to become the emperor of Rome. We're not here because we felt something. We're here because we're convinced. That's what Paul is saying here. Christianity is reasonable. It makes sense. It's not like philosophers have said. It's not a leap of faith. So friend, if you're here today and listening to all of this and Christianity does not for some reason seem reasonable to you, if it just seems like this kind of mystical thing or this leap of faith that I've got to believe things without any good reason to believe them, if that's what you think Christianity is, then friend, you've just got it wrong.

40:02 Christians aren't asking you to make a leap of faith and believe stuff without any evidence. What we're asking you to do is look at the evidence and make a decision. And we think that if you look at the evidence reasonably, and honestly, you'll say, yeah, it really does look like Jesus got up from the dead. And then it's up to the Holy Spirit to change your heart. But that's the first step. And if for some reason you think it's a leap of faith, then you've misunderstood it, and you need to talk to somebody here. Let them explain to you why Christianity really is reasonable.

40:34 And that makes sense. Paul thought it did. I also want you to notice that here, second kind of thing from this, is that when Paul begins to think about these worldviews and ideologies that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God, he takes no quarter. He makes no room for them. He's violent with those ideas and with those ideologies. He says we destroy them, we take them captive, and then we punish them.

41:06 Not the people, the ideologies, the ideas. The world's going to tell you, and even some people who call themselves Christian leaders are going to tell you that compassion and love for the world around us is going to mean making room for the false ideologies that are driving the world. Friends, it's untrue. Paul says it right here. When he encounters an ideology that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, his immediate reaction is to work through reason and argument to take that ideology down, to dismantle it, and to destroy it.

41:53 Compassion for the people around you does not mean compassion for the lies that they believe. Learn how to take those arguments down. Study, read, talk, have conversations. But friends, don't make room, don't make room for ideologies and worldviews that exalt themselves against God. In 12 to 18 here, if you look at that sort of last paragraph, the paragraph break I think is in the wrong spot if your Bible divides it like mine.

42:28 I think the paragraph break really ought to be at verse 12 and then run all the way through 18 instead of at 13. But at any rate, in 12 through 18, he turns to a new idea, which is his assertion that, look, I'm not an interloper. I'm not an intruder into the life of you Corinthian Christians. I actually have every right to boast about you. He starts making that argument in 12 by making a distinction between himself and his opponents. Look at verse 12. He says, not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves.

43:00 That's sarcasm again. He's saying, look, I wouldn't dare compare myself to those guys. But he's being very sarcastic because he's going to say later, I'm not inferior to them at all. He wants the Corinthians to pick up on that sarcasm. He says, not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves. And then he says, but when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they're without understanding. They're stupid. Now, why does he say that? He says because all of this like boasting and all of this building one another up and all of this making each other look good, it's just them bouncing off of one another, right?

43:36 They're just comparing themselves to each other with no outside standard and they're just like, it's like climbing up a staircase of air. They're just trying to get above one another without any outside standard and that's without understanding, stupid in other words. That's what they're doing and Paul's making fun of them. I wouldn't dare compare myself to them. You're walking up this staircase of air. But I don't do that, he says. You can see his main point in 13 and 14. He says, but we, I, I'm not going to boast without limits.

44:10 But we'll boast only with regard to the area of influence God assigned to us. And that reaches even to you, Corinthians. Now, what does he mean by that? I'm only going to boast. I'm only going to kind of, you know, be in here talking about the area of influence that God has assigned to me. And that includes you, O Corinthians. What does he mean by that? Well, he's talking about the call that Jesus gave him to be the apostle to the Gentiles. He's saying, God gave me this call to be an apostle to the Gentiles. And you, Corinthians, seeing as you are Gentiles, that means you too.

44:44 So I'm not intruding. I'm not an interloper. In fact, I was the first, he says, to bring the gospel to you. I planted your church. I planted you. I created you through the preaching of the gospel and the power of the spirit. You're here because of me. So any charge he says that he's intruding or that he doesn't belong or that he's not a true apostle to the Corinthians, Paul just rejects it outright. He has every right in the world, he says, to minister among them. In fact, if you look at 15 and 16, his hope is that as he does so, they might actually expand his area of influence even beyond Corinth, right?

45:23 And we know from Romans that his ultimate goal is to make it all the way to Spain, which to the Roman mind was literally the uttermost part of the world, right? You remember the command that Jesus gave to the apostles, right, before he ascended into heaven? He said, you're going to be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the uttermost part of the earth. And every Roman mind went, well, we know what the uttermost part of the earth is. That's Spain. So they thought Jesus was giving them specific instructions to go to Spain. And Paul's like, that's where I'm going. I'm going to Spain. He hopes the Corinthians will help him get there.

45:57 In 17 and 18, Paul kind of gets to the big crescendo of all of this. His boast, unlike his opponents, is not in himself. His boast, he says, is in the Lord. His boast, he says there, is in the Lord. It's the Lord who called him to this work, and it's the Lord who will bring the whole thing to completion. So here's the question, having seen how Paul deals with that whole thing. What are you tempted to boast in?

46:31 What are you tempted to feel proud about in your own life and ministry? Whatever that thing is, whatever comes to your mind, that's the thing that I'm tempted to feel proud about. My service as a deacon, my service as an elder, my service as a pastor of a church, My seminary degree, my UofL degree, my job, my money, what I've accomplished in this life. Whatever it is, friend, you need to realize that it's God who gave it to you and it's God who can take it away. So what should you therefore boast in?

47:07 Well, like Paul, you should boast in the Lord. You should boast in the fact that thanks to nothing you've done for yourself, you now stand forgiven and righteous before God. You should boast in the fact that because of what Jesus did for you, not because of what you did for yourself, but because of what he did for you, you're going to enjoy all the blessings of eternity. And you know what the irony in that is? If you're boasting in that way, if you're saying, I'm going to be in heaven because of nothing I've done and everything he did, the irony of it is that that's really not boasting at all, is it?

47:44 It's praising and it's worshiping someone else. It's not saying anything about yourself, but it is saying everything about Jesus. That's Paul's boast. It's in the Lord. Second, Paul's boast in his weakness. Second point, Paul's boast in his weakness. In chapter 11, Paul continues with this theme of boasting, but now he takes it in a whole new direction. Basically, Paul's decided that he's going to have to play a little bit of his opponent's game.

48:18 When he opens up chapter 11, you can see it. He's going to have to do some boasting. He's going to have to get on their level and convince the Corinthians that he's worthy of them listening to him. He doesn't want to do it. And you can see it throughout chapter 11. He is completely against playing this game of boasting. But he's going to have to do it because their minds have been so corrupted by these false teachers that he's afraid they're going to be dragged off like Eve was dragged off by the serpent. He's doing everything in his power to stop that from happening. But first, he takes a few verses to kind of work himself up to it, right?

48:48 He doesn't just dive into this boastful speech. He works himself up to it. He kind of convinces both him and the Corinthians that he really should do that. So that's what he's doing in 1 through 15. He's kind of psyching himself up. If you look at verse 1, you can see that Paul knows immediately. He knows right off the bat that what he's about to do in this boastful speech that he's about to make. He knows it's foolishness. There's no doubt about it. But he's going to do it anyway because he's afraid this is just the last ditch effort to keep the Corinthians from being deceived and dragged away from the gospel.

49:21 Look at verse 1. He says, I wish you'd bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me. Right? It's like, I don't want to do this, but bear with me because I have to. And the reason I have to is because I feel a divine jealousy for you since I'm the one who betrothed you to one husband to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But now, he says, I'm afraid that just as the serpent deceived Eve by his coming, your thoughts are being led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. And then verse 4 is interesting because, you know, you think it's going to be like Galatians, right? If somebody comes and preaches to you a gospel that's different from the gospel I preached or presents to you another Jesus, and you think he's going to end it with, let them be anathema, right?

49:58 That's what you're expecting. But he doesn't say that in 4. He says, if somebody comes and preaches to you a new gospel or presents to you a new spirit or gives you a new Jesus, you just accept it. You take it readily enough. You're willing basically to swallow anything that anybody feeds you, he says. And that scares him. He says, you put up with it readily enough. Indeed, I consider that I'm not in the least inferior to these super apostles. Even if I'm unskilled in speaking, not sure if that's sarcasm or not, might not be.

50:30 Even if I'm unskilled in speaking, I'm not so in knowledge. Indeed, in every way, we have made this plain to you in all things. So you can see his argument there. I'm afraid for you, spiritually. And so that's why I'm about to do this foolish thing of boasting about myself. 7 through 11 there is a kind of parenthesis where he again, we've already talked about this, he answers the charge again that he hadn't taken any money from them. And then in 12 to 15, he's still kind of psyching himself up to do this thing. In 12 to 15, he finally just unloads on these false teachers.

51:03 So look at 13. He says, these men are false apostles, deceitful workmen disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, these guys, also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds. In other words, they're going to get what's coming to them in the last day. Well, finally, in 16, we finally get to 16. He's about to start this boastful speech of his.

51:36 But he's almost, he's kind of like a kid who's getting ready to jump into a cold swimming pool, right? He like winds up for it and almost jumps in 16. But then he pulls back and he's like, I don't know. This is so dumb. I don't even know if I'm going to do it, right? He just does this over and over again. Finally, in verse 21, he jumps in the water. And for the first couple of verses, it's exactly what you would expect. So look at middle of 21, that paragraph break there, because this is where it starts.

52:07 He says, all right, here we go. Whatever anyone else dares to boast of. Did I mention that this is stupid? I'm speaking as a fool. Whatever anyone dares to boast of, I also dare to boast of it. It's exactly what you'd expect. Are they Hebrews? Me too. Are they Israelites? Me too. Are they children of Abraham? Me too. Are they servants of Christ? I'm a better one. This is so stupid. I'm a better apostle with far greater labors. See what he's doing?

52:37 He's putting his credentials on the table. He's got his Hebrew credentials. He's got his apostle credentials. He's laying it all out on the table. But then in the middle of 23, there's a shift that nobody would have been expecting. What Paul should have done in the middle of 23 is go on with a very similar thing. It should have been something like, do they say that they are apostles? I am a better one. With far greater labors, far more churches planted, far more people converted to Christ, far more glory brought to God through my preaching, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

53:10 But that's not what he does. Instead, he shifts to things that literally nobody would have thought it worthy of boasting about. Look at it, 23B. 23, like B means the second half of it. That's how we talk about it sometimes. Are they servants of Christ? I'm a better one. I'm talking like a madman. With far greater labors, far more imprisonments, countless beatings, often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews, 40 lashes less one. That meant just short of death. It was sort of colloquially understood that if you received 40 lashes, that was death.

53:44 You were going to die with 40 lashes of the whip. 39, you're fine. 40 lashes less one. Three times I was beating. And he just goes on and on and on with this. Now, there's no need to go in and touch on each one of those things. Most of them, not all of them, but most of them are described in the book of Acts. But you see the point, right? These are things that nobody should have been boasting about. These are things that anybody in the Roman Empire would not have seen as things to boast about, but they would have seen them as defeats.

54:18 They would have seen them as humiliations. I mean, yeah, you can kind of read and say, well, he survived them, right? It's something to boast about that you survived all these things, but that's not Paul's point, and that wouldn't have convinced the Corinthians anyway. These are defeats, they're humiliations. And Paul's point is that these things themselves are what he boasts in. Why? I mean, if you're left a little confused by that, why is Paul boasting and getting beat?

54:50 Why is he boasting and shipwrecking himself? If you're a little confused by that, then believe it or not, you're seeing the point. And the key to it is back up in 17, verse 17. Paul's not, 10, 17. Paul's not going to boast in things that would make you think that he is glorious. Not even in the fact that he survived all this stuff. No, he's gonna boast in these things. He's going to boast in these defeats and humiliations.

55:22 He's going to hold those things up to you as the hallmarks of his life. Because when you look at those, it will show you that Paul is not glorious, but his king is. And that's what he wants you to see. Same thing in 30 to 32, there at the end. He says, if I must boast, I'm going to boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, he who is blessed forever, knows I'm not lying. At Damascus, the governor under King Aratas was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me.

55:54 But I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped. He says he doesn't want you to think of that as a great and daring escape. Wow, Paul, you're incredible. You escaped King Aratas. Damascus, no, he wants you to laugh at him because he's being let down by the wall in a fruit basket. It's humiliating. It's ridiculous. And Paul holds that up and says, this is the kind of guy, this is the kind of thing that I boast in. But why? Why does Paul want you to see his weakness and not his strength?

56:27 Because that's the very essence of what it means to be a Christian. To be a Christian is fundamentally to recognize your weakness and your spiritually bankruptcy. Spiritual bankruptcy. To be a Christian is to recognize that you're a sinner, you're a rebel against God, you're bankrupt before him. You have nothing to offer him, and what you deserve is to be crushed by the king you've rebelled against. That's the fundamental recognition of Christianity.

56:58 The very first thing you've got to get is that you deserve to be destroyed by the king you've rebelled against. And yet, and yet, and yet that king holds out his hand in mercy and says, Come to me, bow your knee to me as King of kings and Lord of lords, and I'll stand in your place. The punishment that you deserve, the wrath that you deserve for rebelling against my father, I'll take it for you and exhaust it in my own body. That's what it means to be a Christian. A fundamental understanding of your bankruptcy and his overwhelming wealth.

57:40 The scripture reading today in our service made that same point. The walls of Jericho falling. Now you know where the armies of Israel had to start, right? They had to start with the understanding that they weren't going to take Jericho on their own. And then they had to continue on with the understanding that they really couldn't do anything to make the walls of Jericho fall. A point that was underlined in so many ways by God as he made them walk out there and march around that city day after day after day.

58:20 I mean, imagine the soldiers on the walls of Jericho looking at them, marching around this. Are they marching around the city? They looked ridiculous. I mean, you can imagine the grizzled old general of Israel when the order came down from Joshua. He wants me to do what? March around the city? And then on the seventh day, were going to march around the city seven times and blow the trumpets at it, they're going to think we're morons. But they did it. Because they knew that they couldn't do anything to make the walls fall. Only God could. So they did what God said. The same thing needs to be true of you. You need to understand that there is nothing you can do to save yourself. You need to understand that all you can do is do what God says. And you know what he says? Whoever, whoever believes in him, in Jesus, will not perish, but have everlasting life. He's not asking you to march around a city.

59:21 He's not asking you to do something that looks foolish. He's asking you to believe in his son, to trust him, to rely on him to save you. And he promises that he will. Let's pray. Our Lord, we thank you and we praise you today because of your goodness and because of the gospel. We pray, oh God, that as we've studied these chapters today, you would take the truth of them and drive it deep into our hearts, that we don't boast in ourselves, we boast only in you. And we pray that that would be the story of our lives.

59:58 Not that we exalt ourselves, but that we do everything in our power to exalt you until the day we stand with you in glory. We ask all of that in Jesus' name. Amen.