Sermon: Introductions for All

All right, let's take a moment and let's pray before we open God's word together.

Our Father, we are thankful that You're a God who chooses to reveal Himself, that Your word is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword. We pray this morning that You would attend to Your word, and that it would divide where there is need, that it would bring healing where there is need, that it would exhort where there is need, rebuke where there is need, provide comfort and solace where there is need,

as only Your word can do and as only You, the God who is the great physician of the heart knows as each of us has need. So would You minister to us in that very particular way as individuals sitting and standing in this place, and also minister to us as a body, a church that is gathered together, that You might receive the praise and the glory that is due Your name. May Your word not return void this morning. We pray all this in the strong name of Jesus the Christ. Amen.

This morning, 2 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. This is the holy, inerrant, sufficient word of God. "Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, To the church of God that is at Corinth, with all the saints who are in the whole of Achaia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." Though the grass withers and the flower fades, the word of God is forever.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Well, this morning we begin a new series in the Book of 2 Corinthians. For those of you that are new to University Reformed Church, this is our regular diet, is what we do, is we tend to go through books of the Bible sequentially, verse by verse, and we are doing so expositionally. That is, grabbing our understanding of what we are to preach from the text itself. And there are a number of reasons for doing this. One of them is, is it prevents us from just ripping verses out of context and

making up whatever we want to about that verse. It also helps you to understand the context of a whole book as you're going through it sequentially and going through it expositionally. And the third thing that it does primarily is it stops the preacher from just hitting his hobby horses and the things that he wants to preach, and so he has to stick to the text and teach and preach what is in the text. This book, this morning, we are going to look at 2 Corinthians, and

this morning just do an introduction to this. This is a little different than what we will do most weeks because we're spending a good portion of the sermon providing some of the background information on the Book of 2 Corinthians. But it is helpful as we begin to go through the book to understand some of this background information. Paul is the author of this book, the Apostle Paul, and we'll look at that in a little bit here. But first, what I want us to consider is who's he writing to, and

it's the church in Corinth. And it's helpful to understand some of the geography and some of the history of Corinth and the makeup of the city to understand the content of this letter. Corinth was an important city, a kind of crossroads city in the ancient Near East. It sat in the middle and connected together both Greece to the Peloponnese Peninsula. And uniquely, it had two ports. It had a port on the east end of the city and a port on the west end of the city,

so that, in principle, merchants and especially traders going through the seas from the Aegean to the Adriatic or the Adriatic to the Aegean, they could stop on the east side or the west side of the city, drop off their goods, and then they could be transported by oxcart to the other side of the city and loaded onto ships there. And that way it would allow the ships not to have to traverse the greater seas and the more extreme waters.

And being a crossroads of a city itself became a kind of melting pot, a melting pot of Europe meeting Asia. And in fact, in the Roman world, Corinth was considered a very important city, probably the third or fourth greatest city in the Roman Empire at the time, only following Rome and Alexandria and possibly Antioch and Athens. Maybe today it would be similar to Chicago or Houston in America. It's a heady city, an important place.

Its history is also important to understand because Corinth rebelled against the Roman Empire in 146 BC. And because it rebelled, the Roman Empire burned the city to the ground. 100 years later, Julius Caesar will resettle the city, and he will appoint it the capital of the province of Achaia, as Paul points out here in the beginning of this book. And this is important because the city has no old families. There is no old wealth. There is no principal families that have held

positions for decades or even generations. No, most of the people that will settle early Corinth are freed slaves from Rome and retired Roman soldiers. It was a place that you could make of it what you wanted. It was a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps kind of place where you could make your way in the world, and the way that you gained prominence in Corinth was by making wealth. And this was a place where you could make wealth.

Some report that the city grew, by the time the Apostle Paul was there, to about 80,000 inhabitants. And thus, you have a significant melting pot city constituted of self-made people, marked by commerce and marked by trade. And as you can imagine, along with that comes greed and sex. And it's here that Paul, in 50 to 52 AD, will come to minister alongside of Aquila and Priscilla. We're told in the Book of Acts that he reasoned in the synagogue Sabbath after

Sabbath with both the Greeks and the Jews, trying to communicate them the truth of the gospel, that God the Father sent God the Son into the world, that He became incarnate, and this is the Christ, the longed-for promised Messiah, that was crucified upon the cross, that was buried and raised on the third day and now has ascended to glory and there He reigns, and that the only way to be saved is believing in this Lord Jesus Christ.

And he received much opposition for preaching such things in the synagogue, to the point that people reviled him for doing so. But the Lord will reassure him, will appear to him in a vision at night. That's recorded in Acts. And there, the Lord says to him, "Paul, do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people."

And Paul will courageously respond. We're told in Acts 18:11, we read Paul, quote, "Stayed a year and six months teaching the word of God among them." He founded this church, he pastored these people, and he led many of them to saving faith. He is their father in the faith. He will leave Corinth after serving there for about 18 months, and he will go to Antioch, and it's not too long thereafter, months, years, that all kinds of

problems begin to develop in this church that he founded and he pastored and he led these people to saving faith. And this leads Paul to write a letter to them. What we call 1 Corinthians is actually 2 Corinthians, because we don't have the first letter But we know there was a first letter. We're told in 1 Corinthians 5:9 that he wrote a previous letter to them because of the sexual immorality that they were allowing within their church, and then his

second letter, what we call 1 Corinthians, he addresses a catalog of sins that this church, which he had founded and which he had pastored, had fallen into. They fell into divisions and rivalries. They fell into idolatry, into sexual immorality. They were abusing the Lord's table. They were not having orderly worship. They were abusing the sacraments. They were having pride in their spiritual gifts. They were denying the resurrection,

and on we could go. It's quite a letter, 1 Corinthians. There may have been another letter after what we call 1 Corinthians. There's a lot of scholarly debate about this. If there was, we don't have that either. But we do have this letter, what we call 2 Corinthians, and if you're following the count, that means it's actually either 3 Corinthians or 4 Corinthians. And this letter is absolutely unique. I have fallen in love with this letter over the last year, as it's been ministering to my

soul, and I think as we explore it here this fall and as we explore it this spring together, I'm thinking you will find much solace from it as well. It's unique in that in this letter, Paul is more autobiographical than he is in any of his other letters that he writes, and this letter is filled with emotion. Paul is emotive all over the place. So with that as background, let's begin with our first point this morning, the authority of Christ through the Apostle Paul.

Three things from the text this morning, the authority of Christ through the Apostle Paul, second, the importance of the church, and third, the grace of the gospel. First, the authority of Christ through the Apostle Paul. In some ways, this is not an odd beginning to this letter. If you and I write a letter to one another, we always sign it at the end, but in the ancient Near East, when you wrote a letter, you would often at the outset say

who you were at the very beginning. But in light of what Paul will address in this letter, the way that he begins this letter without introduction is pointed. "Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God." He's an apostle, self-declared but not self-appointed, by the will of God. Apostle means sent out ones.

In many ways, every disciple of Christ is an apostle. "Go therefore and make disciples." We're sent out. But that's not what Paul is referring to here. He's not referring to that general claim of apostle. He's rather referring to that very specific number of the apostles, the distinct group of apostles. You'll remember that Jesus had 12 disciples. He had many more disciples than that, but remember he had that inner core of

12 disciples. They were unique. Among all of his disciples, they alone had been with him from the very beginning, had also received the gospel directly from him, and he had given a special authority, unlike all the rest of the disciples, in their ministries. These are the apostles, 12 of them, like there are 12 tribes of Israel on purpose. And then you'll remember, Judas, one of the 12, betrays the Lord Jesus and then

goes out and he hangs himself, and so the apostles gather together with the disciples and they cast lots to determine who is it that is going to replace Judas. It has to be one that was with us from the beginning, that has received this declaration from the Lord Jesus, and they cast lots, and Matthias' lot comes up, and so Matthias is then made another apostle. But here Paul asserts that he's part of their ranks, an apostle.

This wasn't by self-assertion. Paul received his commission directly from Jesus, as he says, by the will of God. You'll remember that Paul was a Pharisaical zealot, Saul, and he was persecuting Christians. He will stand by approvingly as Stephen is stoned to death, but then that same man, Saul, who later becomes the Apostle Paul, is on the road to Damascus, and there the Lord Jesus appears to him, blinds him, and strikes him to his knees, and he heard from Jesus.

And Paul will say, in light of all of that, he will say, "I'm the least of the apostles. I'm an apostle, but the least of all the apostles." Why? Because he was a persecutor of the church, but he's an apostle, revelation directly from Jesus, sent out by Jesus, who is the Christ according to the will of God. That's his assertion at the beginning.

As Paul says in Galatians 1, his apostleship is, quote, "is not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father." He'll say in 1 Corinthians 9 and 1 Corinthians 15, "I've seen the resurrected Christ." He makes it clear. He had a different path than all the other apostles, but he is not unique from all the other apostles. He is nonetheless an apostle, and his apostleship was confirmed by his signs that he did and by the fruit that he bore.

In fact, he will say this was always God's plan. Paul makes that point in Galatians 1:15, that God, he said, quote, "had set me apart before I was born and who called me by His grace." So let's make clear what Paul was doing here from the very beginning. He's saying this. To reject the Apostle Paul and his message was to reject the authority of Jesus. That's what he's declaring

from the very beginning.

Paul makes this authority clear from the beginning of this letter because the Corinthian Christians have been questioning everything about him. They're questioning who he is. They're questioning his authority. They're questioning his ministry. They're questioning his gospel. These people that he has loved, that he's led to saving faith, that he helped to establish their church, are questioning everything about him, people he has poured out his life for, and that's why this letter is filled with so

much emotion.

There are many in our day who don't like Paul.

I'll admit, in our culture, when you read Paul's letters, you have to do some wrestling. Who hasn't had to wrestle with things that Paul says? But there are those who claim Christ and who claim to be Christians who don't hesitate calling and dismissing Paul as misogynistic and homophobic and anti-Semitic and self-serving and power-hungry. It's one thing to struggle with what Paul says

It's quite another to conclude that Paul doesn't speak for God on this or that issue that he writes about.

To state it simply, my friends, to reject Paul is to reject Christ. That's what he's laying out here at the beginning.

By the will of God, I'm an apostle. You reject what I'm saying, you've rejected Christ. You don't get to choose portions of Paul's letters you like. Nope. By the authority of Christ.

You say, "Well, how can this be? People that he even led to saving faith are questioning him or accusing him." Well, this isn't so strange. Jesus was accused in every way. He was accused of being a drunkard, and a glutton, and a slanderer, and a blasphemer, and a sinner, and weak, and so often are his people. In fact, it's actually from this ground that Paul will press home one of the most important truths in the Book of 2 Corinthians, and that

is this, the centrality of suffering and weakness in the Christian life.

It's not a flaw of the Christian life.

Weakness and suffering are at the very core of the Christian life,

and we're going to see that in the weeks ahead. It seems impossible, is Paul's argument in this book, that there's strength in weakness.

But that's going to be one of the chief messages, strength in weakness.

Paul is opposed to false teachers in Corinth, those who consider themselves super apostles preaching what we might call the theology of glory. He is combating that with what Martin Luther will wonderfully call the theology of the cross. This is his message. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. Strength in weakness to people that pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that have gone from slaves to freed slaves to now self-made men.

Weakness and suffering are very central and key to the Christian life, at the core of it. You say, "Well, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me." Well, stay tuned.

Notice who he writes to, the church of God that is at Corinth with all the saints who are in the whole of Achaia. Our second point this morning, the importance of the church. To the church of God.

When we speak of the church, there is one church. You confessed it this morning. We confess that in the Apostles' Creed. We believe in one holy, catholic, apostolic church. Catholic, not in the sense of Roman Catholic, but catholic in the sense of what that term actually means, universal, across boundaries, across barriers, across nations, across peoples, global, universal church, catholic. And holy. We believe in one holy, catholic, apostolic church.

Holy. It's set apart. It's distinct. One holy, catholic, and it's apostolic. Christ is the chief cornerstone, and the foundation of this church is the apostles and the prophets. What they have written down for us, the word of God, what we have received here, this is the foundation, this good deposit that has been passed down from generation to generation that we have received. This is the foundation of the church. Not what we want to hear, not what we think works the best in our culture, what we

think makes the most sense. No, it's what we've received. One holy, catholic, apostolic church.

The word church is the word ecclesia. It means called out ones.

You'll notice there are localities or corners in the vineyard of that one holy, catholic, apostolic church. God said to Paul while he is wrestling there in Corinth, "I have some of my own that are there in that part of the vineyard, and here in Corinth, they are called out." Called out. But it's also to all the saints who are in the whole of Achaia, that entire region, that this church, the ecclesia, the called out ones, the church that is in Corinth, that is called out by God in

Corinth. He had many there, called according to his name, that he had sent his Son into the world to live and to die for. Why? So that he might call them out. But by the time it reaches the New Testament, that Greek word ecclesia also has a tinge of called out with purpose. Called out to do what? To gather, to assemble. They are called out of the world to gather, to assemble. Why? To give praise to the one who bought them.

My people, called out, gathered to give praise. The church.

Here's what I want you to note about this. Paul began this church, but notice he doesn't consider it his church.

Incredibly instructive.

We did the 60th anniversary yesterday of URC. Oh, so wonderful. You heard so many names of people that have served in this church, that have played key roles,

but it's not their church.

This church is not Jason's church. It's not John Anderson's church. It's not Allan Knapp's church. It's not Tom Stork's church. It's not Kevin DeYoung's church. It's not Grace Baldin's church. There's one name that's above all names. It's Christ's church.

These are his people, gathered by his grace to the praise of his name.

You'll notice that he calls them saints. Maybe you've never thought about that, that you're a saint.

You're a holy one, set apart, distinct, different from those in the world. Is that how you think about yourself? Is that how you think about others in this room? Saints.

Notice they're not saints because of their actions. They have treated Paul horribly. This man that ministered to them and loved them, they have treated worse than a dog.

From that sense, they are anything but saints, and yet they rightfully still are saints, not because of what they did or what they've done, but because of what has been done for them.

They're in Christ, and they've received the grace of Christ, that the Savior who was crucified for them and buried for them and raised on the third day for them, they are in him, raised Those sinners, they're in Christ. They're saints evidenced by their faith in Christ, and thus in Christ, they are holy, they are set apart saints.

And yet you read through these Corinthians and people that they were, and you think all they did was sin.

It's always struck me in 1 Corinthians that Paul, when he writes the letter to them, and before he rehearses all of these sins that they were going through as a church, he says this in the opening of 1 Corinthians. He says, "I give thanks to God always for you."

Why? He says, "Because of the grace of God that was given to you in Christ Jesus." He still sees them as saints.

In this letter, 2 Corinthians, Paul is a father in the faith to them, led many of them to Christ, treated worse than a dog by them. But just as the church is not Paul's, neither are the individual Christians. They're Christ's, so they're saints. And so it's true for you if you're in Christ, a saint. Now Paul's going to call them to live in holiness in this letter, but he doesn't allow, note this, he doesn't allow their personal rejection of him

to cause him to personally reject them.

File that one away.

It's highly instructive at the very beginning. They are God's people. And the church and her people are so very important and worthy of your love, no matter the cost. They're worth it.

Now we're going to see in this letter sometimes, and oftentimes I could even say the church causes its own people some of the greatest pains in this world. Some of the greatest pains in this world come at the hands of God's people. We love much, so we can be hurt much. But Paul follows in the footsteps of Christ, and so we are to do the same. The answer is not to withdraw. The answer is not to keep out your 10-foot pole so that nobody gets too close.

It's not to come in those doors late, so you can check the box and then leave as quickly as you can so that you don't get touched by anybody. No, that's not what it's to look like. You're to love the church, to be part of the church. God's people are always worth loving. They're always worth being hurt for. They are always worth suffering for.

You say, "Well, Jason,

maybe you haven't suffered that much at the hands of God's people." How do you know?

I know because Christ suffered and died for them.

They're worth loving no matter what.

So you keep pressing into the church. That's our second point, the importance of the church. Finally, I want us to see from this opening the grace of the gospel. Before anything, before Paul launches into any kind of instruction, any kind of correction, any kind of teaching, he begins with this greeting that is really a blessing and a prayer for the saints in Colossae. "Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." This

is Paul's apostolic blessing, and he uses a play on words here that isn't quite clear in the English. A normal greeting in the Greek world would've been hi or hello, and that word is chairé in Greek, chairé. And he just changes it from hello to grace, charis, spelled very similarly. I'm not giving you a hello. I'm extending to you grace. Grace and peace to you in the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace, that unmerited favor that he says can only flow

from God our Father. He's mentioned first God the Father because He's the fountainhead. He's the wellspring of all grace. The Son didn't convince the Father by His death upon the cross. No, the Father is the fountainhead of grace. He and the Son covenanted in eternity past that the Son would come and die for sinners. And so it is from God the Father through the Son by the Spirit that you receive grace.

God the Father. And then he says Christ, Lord Jesus Christ. He calls Him Lord. He's exalted. He's authoritative. He's King.

As Machen observed once, he said, "Everywhere in the Epistles, the attitude of Paul towards Christ is not merely the attitude of man to man or scholar to master. It's the attitude of man toward God." It's the God man who by the will of the Father has come into the world to live and to die for sinners so that you might receive unmerited favor, grace.

And notice that grace always precedes peace.

He secures grace and grants peace.

The word peace is not simply tranquility. It's not simply a ceasing of hostilities. It has a Jewish background. It has the idea of wholeness, and it's tinged with Christianity by the time that Paul is writing it here. He's speaking about a kind of total harmony, harmony within and without, harmony within your soul where you're not guilt-ridden, filled with shame. But not just not having this inner turmoil, but there's no longer this outward

turmoil. There's a wholeness. That dividing wall between Jew and Gentile has been destroyed, and so there can be peace between men where we are united together in Christ, where there is neither male nor female, neither Scythian or barbarian, neither slave or free, but we're all in Christ on equal ground. But not just peace within and not just peace with one another, but peace with God.

The holy God that I've so offended, that I have struck out with my fist towards,

who I have sought to kick off of His throne.

I have peace, wellbeing, wholeness. It's well with my soul.

All this that was lost in the garden, regained and even surpassed in Christ the Lord from God. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, the gospel.

This is what's needed above all else. That's why Paul starts his letter here.

We're beginning a new semester. Some of you are beginning a new part of your life. You've moved here to do undergraduate studies or moved here to work on a PhD or to do post-grad studies, and your mind's filled with mechanical engineering, and you're excited about education, excited about business theory, all good things.

But this is the most important thing.

Paul begins the letter this way. It's not just the beginning of 2 Corinthians. It's the beginning, it's the middle, and it's the end of what you and I are to be focused on in this life. Not just for a season of life, but life.

Notice what he has done. The authority of the apostles, the Word. Love the Word.

Second, love the church. Third, love the Lord by his grace and know peace.

You center all your life on those three things, loving the Word, loving the church, and loving the Lord.

This city that is filled with materialism, filled with pride and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, filled with self, their own authority,

Paul says it's here we begin.

Here's authority, the Word. Here's where you live it out in the church. Here's what you've been called together for and called out for, to give praise to him. Love the Word, love his people, the church, love God by grace through faith.

And what peace is given as a result.

I pray you know it this morning. We have a lot to learn in 2 Corinthians over the weeks ahead. Let me pray for us.

Our Father, we are thankful you're a God who's chosen to reveal himself by his Word. We're thankful for the gift of the church in which we get to work out this Word in our living. But most importantly, we are thankful that you have given and secured grace to us through your Son, that we might know peace within and without forevermore. Thank you for being our God, and truly it is a peace that floods us in knowing that indeed it can be well with our souls now and forevermore,

looking to you, our Father, in Christ our Savior, by the grace given to us. We pray all this in his strong name. Amen.