Authentic Gospel Ministry

2 Corinthians chapter 2, starting in verse 5. Now, if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure not to put it too severely to all of you.

For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough. So you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him.

For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything. Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs.

When I came to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ, even though a door was opened for me in the Lord, my spirit was not at rest because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I took leave of them and went on to Macedonia.

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God, among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.

Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God in the sight of God, we speak in Christ.

This is the word of the Lord. Okay, so our passage this morning is about forgiveness, at least the first half of it. And the Bible takes forgiveness very seriously.

You might remember how Jesus concludes the Lord's Prayer in Matthew chapter 6, in the Sermon on the Mount. He says, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

But forgiveness is really hard, isn't it? It's costly. The root of the idea has to do with cancelling a debt. Which is fine if someone owes you barely anything, but is extremely difficult if someone owes you vast amounts.

Would you cancel a debt of $10,000? Or $10 million? Forgiveness always costs us something. And sometimes that cost can feel impossibly high.

And then, of course, this kind of just financial idea, this root financial idea, becomes a metaphor for other debts that we rack up by doing the wrong thing and hurting each other. So when someone commits a crime, they have a debt to repay to society.

It's not necessarily a financial thing. It's just about justice. You owe us, I don't know how they calculate these things sometimes, but anyway, you owe us 30 years in prison.

And if you do that, you will have repaid your debt to society. Or sometimes someone might complete half of their sentence and for whatever reason, good behaviour or whatever, the judge might cancel or forgive or remit the rest of the sentence.

And then all of us have personal debts too, don't we? People that have wronged us. I'm sure that some of us in this room have been wronged in terrible ways. And I'm not going to try and re-traumatise you by bringing it all up.

But I just do want to acknowledge that forgiveness is costly because evil is real. And sometimes some moments in our lives are very, very dark and the wounds that linger are very, very deep.

Worst of all is when people we trust or people who were put in place to take care of us betray that trust and take advantage of our vulnerabilities.

I'm thinking of husbands, wives, parents, teachers, doctors, nurses, and of course, pastors. But we all sin against each other in many ways, don't we?

Someone once described marriage to me that it's like locking two porcupines together in a suitcase. Someone is bound to get hurt.

And I think that's true of church communities too because it's just true of all close relationships between sinful people. When we get close to one another, we hurt one another.

You know, everyone can be nice for the first five minutes. But once you get to know them, everyone has an ugly side and some prickles. But we can't stay away from one another either because that hurts in its own way too, doesn't it?

You know, we were made for relationships. So we're sort of caught between a rock and a hard place, between the pain of relationships and the pain of loneliness and isolation.

Which is why forgiveness is always important in human relationships. In Colossians chapter 3, for instance, Paul tells the church in Colossae, Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other.

As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body.

And be thankful. Now notice again, the seriousness with which God treats forgiveness. Paul says, you must forgive. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

Forgiveness is not an optional thing. And partly that's because without it, you know, there is no church. There is no community.

I don't just mean that we have to be forgiven by God in order to enter the church, though that's true. But I mean that between brothers and sisters, between porcupines as it were, there can be no church or no community unless we have a way of cancelling debts, of drawing a line on the things, of saying enough is enough.

You know, I will bear the cost of this injustice or mistreatment because I can't seek payback this time. So rather than exacting vengeance or even seeking justice, you know, our society is so litigious.

We know our rights. We are encouraged to stand on our rights, stand up for ourselves. In some quarters, it is even argued that forgiveness is weak. In fact, forgiveness is immoral.

Because forgiveness protects the perpetrators. Instead of the victims. And of course, I can see the truth in some of that. It would be a wicked society where heinous criminals were forgiven cheaply and there was no justice for the oppressed.

The poor and vulnerable were always being asked to bear the cost. But the big problem with this view, of course, is that it can really only work if you can separate society out neatly into perpetrators and victims, which just isn't the world that we live in.

We live in a world where we're all both. We're all porcupines, both stabbing and prickling one another back and forth all the time in any number of ways.

There has to be a way then in the world that we actually live in of doing justice and loving mercy at the same time. We can't turn a blind eye to sin, but also we can't devolve into constant recriminations, trying to make sure that everyone pays back every sin, every time.

No mercy. Now in the Christian community, and I would say that there really is no other satisfactory answer outside of the Christian community, outside of the gospel, to resolve this tension, in the Christian community, justice and mercy are resolved at the cross, aren't they?

The cross is where our sins were paid for, where God bore in himself the unfathomable cost of all the debts we had racked up.

And when Jesus rose from the dead, by doing that, God was justifying him. That means he was declaring him righteous and undeserving of the death that we had declared him worthy of.

Now when a person is united to Christ, and we express this kind of thing when we get baptized or when we take communion or any of those kinds of symbols, when a person is united to Christ, his death becomes our death and his resurrection becomes our resurrection.

So everyone in the Christian community, our sins have been paid for and condemned at the cross. And now we have been justified through the resurrection as we share in Christ's justification.

So there is now no longer any condemnation hanging over our heads. And even more than that, the cross doesn't just pay for our sins but sort of then just leave us unchanged so that we can get back to sinning.

And the cross also enables our repentance. This is the way we turn away from our sins to continually die to them and choose to live the new way in the power of the resurrection. Okay, but why am I saying all this?

It's because my point is that the very existence of the Christian community depends on forgiveness. Not just in terms of how we get in, but in terms of how we go on.

The only way we can survive in our life together, each of us has to keep repenting, turning away from the old self, putting on the new self.

And as people do repent, we have to forgive them. We cannot keep condemning people who have died to their old sins and started again, justified in the Lord Jesus.

We can't keep throwing their sins in their face if God has justified them. Now, we don't necessarily have to trust them again.

Right? Forgiveness is not the same thing as trust. It's not quite as simple as just reinstating them, things exactly as they were before. And obviously, there's a difference between true repentance and just feeling sorry for oneself or regretting things, etc.

Being sad you didn't get away with it. Hoping you can be smarter next time. Anyway, there are some nuances we don't have time to go into now. So I don't want to say the whole thing is just super straightforward.

But I do want to remind you that the point remains, forgiveness is absolutely, an absolutely essential ingredient of the Christian life, of belonging to the church, of preserving the church.

Without forgiveness, churches implode or explode, maybe depending on the temperaments of the culture. And remember, Matthew 18, 21, Peter came up and said to Jesus, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him?

As many as seven times. Peter's probably thinking that was generous. Jesus said to him, I do not say to you seven times, but 77 times.

Okay, so as hard as forgiveness is, Jesus demands that his followers relentlessly forgive again and again and again as many times as it takes. And let me encourage you as well, brothers and sisters, if this is feeling really hard for you just at the moment.

Whenever Jesus commands us to do something, he also supplies the strength to do it. So forgiveness seems too hard for you. Don't get me wrong. I understand that. Forgiveness is extremely hard.

But that shouldn't drive us to despair. It should drive us to Jesus. Okay, let's turn to 2 Corinthians chapter 2 then. We don't have a very long passage to work through this morning, but there are some very important and wonderful things, beloved, that Paul says here for us to trust and obey.

Point number one. If you're following on the outline, you'll see it's verses 5 to 11, and I've called this section Fighting for Forgiveness. Paul says in verse 5, Now if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it to me, sorry, he's caused it not to me, but in some measure, not to put it too severely, to all of you.

Now the ESV slightly obscures something here I just think is worth pointing out. The word pain is actually there twice in the Greek, and it's in a really emphatic form. It's really highlighted in neon lights.

So I think Paul wants to stress that this person, whoever it is that he's talking about, and we don't really know, but this certain someone, has deeply wounded him. And not to put it too severely, he has deeply wounded the whole congregation.

Now, as I say, we don't know exactly who this person was, and we don't know exactly what he did. Some people connect him to the bloke in 1 Corinthians 5, but I don't think that's really, I don't think that makes any sense really.

By the sounds of things, the problem here is not sexual immorality or something like that, but something much more directly related to Paul. Most likely, I think, this guy has been one of the guys maybe at the center of the movement away from Paul.

The loudest voice against Paul. He's been the one stirring up trouble, discontent, grumbling, division, suspicion against Paul, that kind of thing, undermining Paul's relationship with the Corinthians.

I think that's the most likely scenario. So, on the one hand, Paul is not trying to downplay what the man has done, because it's actually really important to him to rebuild his relationship with the Corinthians.

But conversely, he's not trying to exaggerate it either, and he doesn't want to put it too severely. I see how Paul is trying to walk that line. It's easy for people in the midst of pain and conflict, either to suppress things and soften things, you know, because it's very uncomfortable to talk bluntly about our sins, or to lash out emotionally and exaggerate, to overstate things because we're in pain.

So, Paul, I think, is a model for us of wisdom and clarity and patience and self-control here. He wants the congregation to understand that what this man has done has actually severely pained them both.

It was a terrible thing. But now it's time for forgiveness. In verse 6, you see, he wants to lead them to try and forgive this brother and to draw a line under this conflict.

He says, for such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough. So you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.

Some of the vocab here links back to chapter 1. Did you notice that? The language of comfort in chapter 1. And also that word excessive is related to the word overflow or abundant that we saw in chapter 1, verse 5.

So the point, remember, is that God ultimately is the God of all comfort. God is the source of all the comfort in the Christian life. And it's only as he comforts us through Christ and his death and resurrection that we have the power to comfort others.

So Paul is calling on the Corinthians here to draw strength from Christ and forgive and comfort this person who has grieved them.

And he warns them that if they don't forgive him, then actually he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow, that abundant, overflowing sorrow. Instead of being washed in overflowing comfort from chapter 1, he will be drowned in sorrow and pain.

Again, it's the same word translated pain in verse 5. So the question is, do the Corinthians, and do we then, want a community where pain begets pain?

You hurt me, so I hurt you. And it fills us all up with bitterness and resentment and anger and we all just drown in the pain of our sins. or do we want a community where comfort overflows from God and then into and through each one of us?

I think, brothers and sisters, that we have a choice, each of us, even this morning, to nurse grudges and resentments in our hearts or to fight for forgiveness, to fight against the flesh rather than against one another.

Perhaps you catch yourself being cynical, bitter, nitpicking. Do you?

Do you need help with this, brother or sister? So just as an aside, really, this is not in 2 Corinthians, but it struck me that in that passage from Colossians where Paul emphasizes forgiveness so much, he talks about a bunch of other things in and around it, like humility, compassion and especially thankfulness.

So if I can help you to deal practically with the unforgiveness in your heart, let me encourage you to think about humility. And it means not thinking too highly of yourself, acknowledging and confessing your own weaknesses and sins.

That'll help you forgive others. Humility. Compassion. Understanding the struggles of other sinners around you. Try to cultivate some sympathy for those who have wronged you.

Because, especially in here, they might actually even wish themselves that they were more like Jesus, but they just aren't perfect yet. And you know what that's like, don't you?

You know, transformation in the Christian life is painfully slow. I'm as frustrated with myself as you are. And then thankfulness.

Don't let the bad things you see around you blind you to all the good things. God's lavish grace towards us, both in creation, in salvation, in giving us each other, we get to belong to his people.

Think about all the blessings God has given you. Is it really all bad? Let thankfulness soften your heart and help you to forgive.

So Paul says, I beg you to reaffirm your love for him. This is why I wrote that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything. Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive.

Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ. So that we would not be outwitted by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs.

I just want to pick up on that last phrase. Are we ignorant of Satan's designs? You know, he is a crafty opponent who, if we're not careful, will outwit us.

But we know what he's about, don't we? How he works. It's the oldest trick in the book. Divide and conquer. Satan's plan is to use unforgiveness, unresolved anger, cynicism, and suspicion lurking in the hearts of God's people to spread hatred and lies and distrust, stir up division and fights, ultimately in the hope of bringing down the whole community.

it's interesting in Ephesians 4 when Paul talks about anger. He also brings up the devil and says much the same thing.

Do not let the sun go down in your anger and give no opportunity to the devil or no foothold. Anger and unforgiveness, these things put us in spiritual danger.

anger. The problem when we let anger fester in our hearts is that we lose sight of the real enemy. We think to ourselves that our fight is against flesh and blood, but it isn't.

The devil is playing us off against each other. Reminds me of that moment in Lord of the Rings. When, you know, when the fellowship of the ring, if you don't know this, just tune out for 30 seconds, when the fellowship of the ring are all at each other's throats and the ring is just sitting there on the table in the middle.

Do you remember this moment? It's so, you know, seemingly innocuous, just silently there. But Frodo sees where the hatred is really coming from, where the hatred is flowing from.

And just so, you know, we have a choice. Do we want to be a community ruled by the comfort of God or a community ruled by Satan and his wicked designs and his hatred?

Now, in the second section of the passage then, the tone shifts. Paul gets back to his travel plans. Remember, he's sort of retelling the story of their relationship to them with a theological commentary thrown in.

So now he talks about his journey into Macedonia in verses 12 and 13. He started off in Ephesus. He's heading up via Troas and into Macedonia. The point of this section is to emphasize just how desperately Paul wanted to know how the Corinthians had received his letter.

Right? So let me put it to you this way. What do you think it would take for the Apostle Paul to turn down an opportunity for fruitful evangelism?

Right? What do you think it would take? So he says, when I came to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ, even though a door was opened for me in the Lord, my spirit was not at rest because I did not find my brother Titus there, so I took leave of them and went on to Macedonia.

It's interesting how Paul doesn't take open doors as a sign of guidance, just by the way. I mean, that's just an aside really, but did you notice that? You know, if you've ever wondered about that kind of thing, Paul turns down this open door.

But more to the point, remember, Paul wasn't just keen to see his brother Titus because, you know, he really likes Titus and he wanted to hang out. In the context, Titus is the one who took Paul's severe letter to the Corinthians and then Paul is eager to hear back from Titus about how the letter had been received.

This is why he's turning down the opportunity for fruitful evangelism in Troas. So I think it's just a little lesson for us maybe about evangelism. Evangelism is very important.

But it's not the be-all and end-all. It's not the only game in town. You know, I mentioned to you a couple of weeks ago that ultimately we care about mission because we care about the church, not the other way around.

In fact, there's no point going out on mission if we don't have a loving family to come back to and to gather people into a forgiving family. And so Paul spends a lot of time evangelizing, reaching the lost, breaking new ground for the gospel, etc.

But he didn't only spend his time doing that. He spent much of his time strengthening the churches, going back over old ground into towns and cities where he'd planted churches years before to make sure that the churches were still growing and healthy and godly, loving communities.

And he seems to have spent a lot of time writing letters to these churches as well, of course, strengthening them with the gospel, not just writing tracts.

And so that's what's happening here. Paul is so concerned to find out how the Corinthians are going that he even gave up a great opportunity for evangelism in Troas to press on into Macedonia to find Titus so that he could hear about how the Corinthians were going.

And that should tell the Corinthians and us just how much he values healthy churches. He wants to strengthen them, to encourage them, to reestablish them as partners in the gospel because, you know, certainly healthy churches are going to further the cause of the mission rather than undermine it.

But Paul doesn't want his work among the Corinthians to be in vain or to fall in a heap, losing people out the back door while he's sort of gathering more people in the front door, if you know what I mean. So he's desperate to find out how the Corinthians are going.

Okay, but that brings us to section three where Paul's tone changes again. He says, But thanks be to God who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere.

Now, I love this image. Remember, Paul is traipsing around the countryside, right, seemingly driven by anxiety and ignorance. He wants to know how the Corinthians are going.

His spirit is not at rest. But in fact, he says, what's really happening is that God is leading us in triumphal procession like a grand parade across Macedonia.

You might know when a Roman emperor or a general returned from a great military campaign, they would be given a triumph, a grand parade that would sometimes last for days, a chance to ride through the streets of Rome in a great chariot pulled by four horses at the head of a long train of their captives being dragged along in chains behind them as well as the booty and so on, the spoils of war, you know, exotic animals.

Oh, that's a peacock or something. And Paul is saying that he is one of God's captives, not one of the peacocks, he is one of God's captives being dragged across the world to display the victory and triumph of God.

And he's not at all disappointed by this, he says, thanks be to God because he's been liberated from his old life of sin and plundered from Satan's domain, you know, living in the darkness among the barbarians and then he's been brought in to belong to God.

You see how this image then is leading us into the next section of the letter and the main theme of the letter because it's all about how Paul's life simultaneously projects both power and weakness.

Right, Paul's life is simultaneously a display of his own weakness, after all, he's just a defeated captive, and God's power because God is the conquering hero at the head of this magnificent triumph leading Paul through the world to display his glory.

And as Paul wanders around the Mediterranean, God is spreading the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ everywhere. So again, it was common in these ancient parades for the captives to throw out incense as they walk through the streets.

Paul is saying that as he preached the gospel, he's like one of those captives spreading fragrance everywhere. in verse 15, this aroma rises up to God, which I think is meant to remind us of the Old Testament sacrifices, doesn't it?

You know, the smell of Paul's evangelism is pleasing to God. But back on earth, the crowds lining the streets are divided, verse 15, we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.

To one, a fragrance from death to death, to the other, a fragrance from life to life. And I love how Paul ends verse 16 with this very relatable question. He says, who is sufficient for these things?

I think the word that comes to my mind is whiplash. And imagine being paraded through the streets with some, on the one hand, adoring what you're saying.

You know, as they smell the sweet fragrance of Christ calling them to salvation and by the power of the gospel, these people have been made alive and they're on their way up into life to the full. You know, more and more life.

I love the apostle Paul. He's one of my great heroes. You know, a champion. Then on the other hand, around the very next corner, there might be an angry mob of those who are perishing who, when they hear the exact same message, they turn their nose up in disgust and are nauseated by it as if he might as well be throwing feces at them.

and they hate the apostle Paul and everything that he stands for. And Paul says their problem is that they're dead and that actually the message of Christ to them just has the effect of confirming them in their death spiral that they are dead and dying and on their way to the second death as they reject God and now, not only his grace to them in creation, but in the clear and unambiguous preaching of Christ.

So Paul says, who is sufficient for these things? I think he means something like, how could anyone possibly bear such a jarring rollercoaster of a life? My life feels like a case of constant whiplash, never knowing if I'm going to be met with adulation or revulsion.

And finally, verse 17, for we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God, we speak in Christ.

In other words, there is an easy way out of the tumultuous life of the faithful gospel worker. Unfaithfulness. The word peddlers.

This is the only time it appears in the scriptures. It has to do with being dishonest, tricky, a huckster. When I look up my Greek dictionary, it says, this word almost comes to mean adulterate, because of the way that an unscrupulous salesman just does whatever they can to shift product and make a profit.

In the ancient world, because salt was expensive, they used to mix it with chalk to bulk it up. They used to cover up pottery, cracks in pottery, with wax.

And that's where we get the word sincere from, actually. It means to be without wax. It's a Latin word. Sincere means no pretense. Without wax. There really aren't any cracks.

In our own day, the way they pump meat full of water so that it looks like you're getting a really good juicy steak and bang for your buck and then it shrivels down to nothing when you put it on the barbecue.

It's just all water. Well, Paul is saying there are any number of tricks that people use, that many people use, he says, these shady gospel salesmen, but we never played tricks with God's word.

We didn't water it down. We didn't adulterate it. Even though, inevitably, faithfulness to God's word makes for a tough rollercoaster of a life.

We never dared to mess with God's word because we minister as commissioned by God and in the sight of God. And he finishes off, we speak in Christ, meaning that Christ actually is the one who gives him the strength and the grace that he needs to keep ministering faithfully.

Remember, again, the context of Isaiah in the background here. Paul sees himself as a servant of the servant, extending the ministry of the promised servant of Isaiah, extending the ministry of Christ to the nations, bringing comfort and salvation to the world.

Christ is actually the one still accomplishing his gospel mission through Paul. by the power of the Holy Spirit. So everything Paul is doing is in the sight of God, commissioned by God, and in Christ.

All right, so it's time to wrap up. I want to finish just with a quick comment about how I think this passage all holds together because at first, at least to me, it sort of feels a bit disjointed.

The tone keeps changing. Where is Paul going? And I don't think that's really the case. I'm sure the problem is always with me. I think the thing that holds this passage together and this whole book is this theme of authentic gospel ministry.

And authentic gospel ministry. And particularly how power and weakness, comfort and affliction, life and death are all tied together in the Christian life.

So the reason Paul wants to talk about this with the Corinthians is because he doesn't want them to be triumphalistic or naive about the Christian life as if it's all joy and no pain.

It's all victory and no defeats. It's all easy and no anxiety. And so as he wraps up his personal defense and we are shifting into a new section of the letter now so maybe that accounts for some of it but Paul is defending himself in the first section and then he's going to defend just the very nature of new covenant ministry for the next few chapters.

But as he makes this transition, I think what holds the two sections together is still this basic idea that the Christian life is costly and difficult but glorious.

So the Corinthians need to forgive this man as costly, as painful, as difficult as that is. But if they are going to enjoy a loving fellowship and a loving community, forgiveness needs to be a part of it.

Someone needs to pay the cost. Forgiveness is difficult, forgiveness is painful because debts don't just go away. someone has to bear them. But Paul is saying love one another by bearing the cost of forgiveness.

And then as he transitions to the next section he wants to talk about the nature of Christian ministry, how he brings comfort and forgiveness and reconciliation with God to people across the world.

And he talks about the nature of his ministry that although it's weak and full of anxieties and he sometimes faces vicious opposition, it's also the way that God displays his glorious triumph throughout the world that he has rescued a people for himself from the domain of darkness and made them his own.

Let's pray. Amen. Loving Father God, thank you for rescuing us from the domain of darkness and calling us into the kingdom of your beloved Son.

Thank you for forgiving us for all our sins. Help us to be a community full of forgiveness, patience with one another, compassion, kindness, love.

Help us to keep short accounts, to be honest with each other. Please help us to repent of our sins and keep turning towards righteousness and growing to be more like Jesus. We thank you for Paul and his gospel ministry, the way that you dragged him around the Mediterranean to display your glory and that he was willing to bear the cost of the weakness, the hatred of others, that you strengthen him for your service.

We pray for ourselves too that in this life we might not give in to unfaithfulness just for comfort's sake or to make life easier, but that we might serve you faithfully proclaiming this glorious gospel of Jesus ourselves, showing off your power even as we display our weakness and vulnerabilities.

We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.