Well, tonight we're going to be jumping into 2 Corinthians, and I want to thank you for your faithfulness to our Wednesday night service. You being here lets me know that you desire to learn the Word of God. And I'm sure some of you have had long weeks and definitely maybe you've struggled even getting here tonight because of the fatigue of the week, and maybe you're out.
You were out mowing in the sun, and you felt tired from that, so thank you for being here tonight. But 2 Corinthians chapter 3, and when you find your place, if you would stand in honor of God's Word, we're going to read verse 1 down to verse number 6. 2 Corinthians chapter 3, verse 1, verse 6, the Bible says, Do we begin again to commend ourselves, or need we, as some other epistles of commendation to you, or letters of commendation from you? Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men. Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not in tables of stone, but in fleshly tables of the heart. And such trust have we through Christ to Godward.
If you read verse 5 with me, not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God. Verse 6, he goes on and says, Who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament, not of the letter, but of the Spirit, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life. Father, your word is again a joy. It's a blessing beyond measure, and we are so thankful to stand in honor of your word, and now we pray that your word would be engrafted into our hearts. Write your word upon our hearts, God. May it be engraved in us, and may we leave here today with joy and gladness, seeking to obey the word of God, which not only has brought us salvation, but also works in us in sanctification, and increase our faith as we hear your word tonight. And let us leave here tonight also with a passion to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with the world that is lost and dying and going to hell. And God, we pray that your blessing would be upon now, as many have had long weeks, and I pray our attention would be focused upon you.
Give us joy in Christ, and may anyone tonight in our service here, our kids, our adult services, our teen services, if anyone doesn't know Christ, that today would be the day of salvation for them. We ask it in Christ's name, and God's people said, man, you may be seated. Well, as we've seen, 2 Corinthians is the most personal letter that Paul ever penned. It's very, very intimate to his heart as he is pouring his words out on the pages of 2 Corinthians. It's actually the fourth letter that he wrote to the church there at Corinth.
The first letter he wrote to them is not inspired. We have 1 Corinthians, which is actually the second letter he wrote to them, and then the third letter he wrote to them, which was referred to in the Bible as a severe letter. We don't have inspired, but we have this fourth letter, which we call 2 Corinthians. Two letters he wrote were not inspired by God, but they were very purposeful and needful to that church, and two were inspired. I spent over a year preaching through 1 Corinthians, and after that it took me a couple years to get back to 2 Corinthians because you felt like you were slinging mud all over the place all the time. It's just a church with a lot of messes, and maybe God's grace kept us from having all four letters because he knew the church would be fatigued to go through all four, and maybe he was gracious to the church at Corinth and didn't want to list all their issues. They're like, 1 Corinthians was enough, you know, but we don't need any more.
But 2 Corinthians is a wonderful portrait of a pastor's heart and a desire that he had for this body of believers. Now, whenever you have the truth being declared, you will always have those who will promote something that is not the truth. The genuine always creates counterfeits. History records great works of art that have always had forgeries and people who've been conned into taking what is not authentic.
Name brands always have spin-offs trying to claim it is authentic. Some crafty con artists will deceive the undiscerning buyer. Paul closes chapter 2 out with a warning against those who he refers to as ones who would corrupt the word of God, and the word corrupt there in chapter 2 verse 17, he says, For we are not as many which corrupt the word of God.
It comes from a word that also can mean like a huckster, somebody who is a street hawker who cleverly deceives unwary buyers into purchasing a cheap imitation of the real thing. And he's referring to the false teachers who were doing that. They were giving you something that's not genuine, it's not authentic, it's not the true gospel, it's not the true word of God. And later in 2 Corinthians chapter 11, Paul speaks to the depth of this deception, the power of it.
And you need to know that deception is very powerful. 2 Corinthians 11 verse 13, Paul says, For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. That is so interesting because you would think that people that were false would not want to look like the true, like the enemies of the gospel would seek to look less like Christ and they would seek to move away, but they're actually false and they try to mimic him. Again, Acts chapter 16, a demon-possessed girl says of Paul, These are they of the one true God who show unto us the way of salvation. In Mark's gospel, when Jesus first preached in the synagogue, Mark records how a synagogue guy stands up, demon-possessed, says, I know who you are, thou holy one of God. And you would think that they would try to say, oh, you're a devil, but instead he calls Jesus the holy one of God.
He describes him accurately. And so you can have people that are not saved proclaiming things that saved people say, and it becomes a very strong distortion of the truth when you have such. 2 Timothy 3, 13, Paul had warned evil men and seducers, Shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived, as we mentioned this last Lord's Day. And in these times, one of the biggest struggles they had, it wasn't with the Romans, it wasn't with the Greeks, it was with the Jews, and it was a group called the Judaizers. The Judaizers were people who believed that salvation was through Christ, but also through maintaining the law, through keeping certain requirements. You had to be circumcised, they believed, in order to be saved. Now, Old Testament circumcision was replaced with New Testament baptism.
You need to understand that. Old Testament circumcision was a mark and a sign of a covenant between that person and God, and New Testament baptism becomes the mark of your covenant and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And there are churches today that will tell you that in order to be saved, you have to be baptized.
It's the same thing. It's what the Judaizers did. It's a false gospel. In Galatians 5, Paul says to them, he says if you believe Christ plus anything else, he says Christ profits you nothing.
And it's essential to understand that reality. And this happened at the church at Galatians. In Galatians chapter 1 verse 6, Paul writes after he gives his opening commendation to them, he says, I marvel that you are so soon removed from him that had called you, him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel. He says, which is not another. It's not another gospel. But there would be some that trouble you and would pervert the gospel of Christ. And then look what he says in verse 8, but though we are an angel from heaven, even if an angel came, even if Moroni came, even if an angel came and preached any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be, the word there is anathema.
It means accursed. Let even that angel be sentenced to hell. And again, the Jewish way of emphasis is repetition, right? Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the trihagion, the thrice declaration of God's immutable attribute of holiness.
And it's a repetition. And so Paul repeats this here, as we said before, so say we now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you, then that which he have received, let him be accursed or anathema. So there is a false gospel that was penetrating the early churches.
I'm just telling you, if you were in those early churches, you would have looked at the false teachers and been like, how are they false teachers? How are these guys? I mean, they seem so genuine. They seem so zealous. They seem so real. I mean, these guys are so passionate.
They're going from city to city. They are so serious. But here in 2 Corinthians, the false teachers have come against Paul and they are claiming Paul is in fact the false one. It seems amazing, doesn't it, that they can think of Paul being messed up? I mean, like, come on now. This is the Apostle Paul? I mean, you could probably be lost and figure out he's a true guy.
I mean, like, how do they get that? It just lets you know how strong Satan, who is the master deceiver, can be. And the only way deception works is you have to have enough truth to deceive.
There's got to be enough error, though, to mess people up. Henry Ward Beecher was right when he said, a lie always needs truth for its handle. So as we said, this fourth letter Paul has now written to the church at Corinth is a letter that he's writing and he has to defend himself. And he has to defend himself, and this puts people in an awkward position. Have you ever had to defend yourself and then you're like, it makes you feel, like, uncomfortable? Because you're like, you know what, I don't want to defend myself.
I don't want to do that. Shouldn't my reputation be enough? But for Paul, he had to do some of that because an attack on Paul was an attack on the Scriptures. Because Paul wrote 13 books of the New Testament, right?
So if he's not authentic, if he's not trustworthy, then guess what else is not trustworthy? Yeah, they had accused Paul of being fickle. Some of these are the attacks that they came against him in 2 Corinthians. They said he's an authoritarian and a dictator. He didn't have proper credentials. He's a coward. He wasn't dignified enough. He was presumptuous. He was fleshly. These are some of the attacks that they waged against him.
Now, again, they were with the Corinthians, like, among them. And Paul is, at times, hundreds of miles away. He can't just send an email. He can't just send a text. He can't send a phone call.
He can't zoom in. I mean, he's just getting land blasted over there by these false teachers, and it's just a difficult thing. And, you know, questioning someone, throwing questions and accusations can be very disruptive of someone's character. Somebody says, I think I saw your son or daughter at the, and it's some place they weren't supposed to be. I think they, and it's like, whoa, are they, are my kids lying to me?
Or is my spouse being dishonest here? All it takes is, like, a little question to throw you into a tailspin for a day until you figure out what's going on, right? In these accusations, Paul wasn't able to be there to answer, so he's got to write them letter after letter after letter because the assaults were so many. So here in chapter 3, he lays out five marks of a faithful minister versus those who were attacking him. And it's really the hucksters versus the sincere, the false versus the true.
And so let's look at these five tonight as Paul sadly has to defend himself. And the first thing we find are faithful ministers have a godly reputation, a godly reputation. You know, time and truth hold hands, don't they? Whatever a person is always gets revealed over time.
I mean, you just, you wait long enough, and it'll come to light. That is why it is essential, I believe, for pastors to have a longer than shorter tenure at a church. Again, God can move a pastor and send him to a mission field or another church, and that can happen, but it needs to be that the Lord would do that. But the congregation needs to see a pastor go through challenging situations. They need to see how does that man handle that?
Is he real? I can tell you, you could be a weak person and go in and preach a strong message and then go out and not live it. But when you're there all the time and you're there and the years go on, then that begins to lay down a pattern. And you can see, you can begin to read their life with time. John 10, verse 11, Jesus said, I'm the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep. But he that's a hireling and not the shepherd, whose own sheep the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming.
And guess what the hireling does? He leaves the sheep. You know why he leaves? He don't want to go through the hardships. Get a little heavy around here, get a little difficult around here. Things aren't going the way I like.
People are getting frustrating. I've heard some horror stories from pastors. You know, when I came to start Xenia 13 years ago, I had people say, why don't you just take a church over? And I said, well, because I don't want to inherit the problems of other pastors. If I'm going to make problems, I'm going to deal with my own problems, right? I don't want to clean up their mess.
That's like some things I could say, but I won't. But verse 13, he says, the hireling fleeth because he is a hireling and careth not for the sheep. And so Jesus over and over says, that's what they do. And maybe you are in a church where that's happened, where things got kind of difficult and that pastor came for three to five years and they moved.
You know, the average tenure of a pastor is three to five years. They just keep moving. And sometimes they leave and there's nobody there left. I'm always amazed by that. So you're going to tell me God like moved you to take that bigger, more successful church to leave behind that church and you don't even have a pastor left behind. Well, that sounds like a godly thing to do, doesn't it? Can you imagine if I went and took a church somewhere else and Lighthouse was left without a pastor? I was like, well, good luck Lighthouse, but I know the Lord's called me over to Sandy Beach.
