You can be seated. Please turn in your copy of the scriptures to 2 Corinthians. And yes, the reference is correct. 2 Corinthians 2, 12 and 13. And then we’re going to, don’t worry, we’re going to come back to it. But today we’re going to peek also at chapter 7 verses five through 16. So Paul is writing a very emotional letter to the Corinthian church. Uh, he has hoped to visit them. He sent Titus, um, with, with first Corinthians or with the harsh letter. Um, but he’s hoping that he will be able to go and things will go well.
And the reason for the kind of the hop, skip and the jump over like four chapters is he makes a reference, a time reference in chapter two, 12 and 13, And then he picks up with that time reference in chapter seven, verse five. So we’ll come back to the whole other business of the rest of two and three and four and five and six and first part of seven, don’t worry, but you’ll see the method to the madness. So let’s begin in chapter two, second Corinthians chapter two, beginning at verse 12.
Paul 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. And then picking up in chapter seven, verse five, he says, for even when we came into Macedonia, our bodies had no rest. but we were afflicted at every turn fighting without and fear within.
But God who comforts the downcast comforted us by the coming of Titus and not only by his coming, but also by the comfort with which he was comforted by you. as he told us of your longing, your mourning, and your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced still more.
For even if I made you grieve with my letter, I do not regret it. Though I did regret it, for I see that letter grieved you, though only for a while. As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting. For you felt a godly grief so that you suffered no loss through us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret. Whereas worldly grief produces death. For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, but also what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment.
At every point, you have proved yourselves innocent in the matter. So although I wrote to you, it was not for the sake of the one who did wrong, nor for the sake of the one who suffered the wrong, but in order that your earnestness for us might be revealed to you in the sight of God.
Therefore, we are comforted. And besides our own comfort, we rejoice still more at the joy of Titus, because his spirit has been refreshed by you all. For whatever boast I made to him about you, I was not put to shame. But just as everything we said to you was true, so also our boasting before Titus has proved true. And his affection for you is even greater as he remembers the obedience of you all and how you received him with fear and trembling. I rejoice because I have complete confidence in you. Amen. This is the word of the living God.
If you think about the Protestant Reformation and you begin to read a little history and look into what really caused The Protestant Reformation, you could look at all the symptoms and say each of these little issues caused the Protestant Reformation.
You could say the justification by faith issue was the cause. You could say all the empty ceremonies in the church were the cause. You could say the corruption in the priesthood were the cause. But I think you really should look at those as downhill from the primary cause, which is, which was the authority of the Holy Scriptures.
Many of you will know because you have participated in denominations throughout your life and your work or your church life. And you know that when the church ceases to hold the Bible as the sole authority in the life of the church, when it ceases to hold that authority, everything else is a downhill slide. You’ll ordain anybody, you’ll marry anybody, you’ll teach anything, you’ll say anything, you’ll permit anything because the Bible has been cast aside. The word of God no longer has authority and so anything goes.
But the attending symptoms of the need for the Protestant Reformation were in and of themselves huge. Justification by faith alone is a massive problem. If you don’t get that right, you don’t get the gospel right. The empty ceremonies and the problems in worship are another huge matter. Worship is a significant part of the life of a believer. And so if you don’t get worship right, we miss much. In the life cycle of any organization, but especially the church, you have these three important things to understand.
You have formation. We’re going to form the church. And then over time, you have deformation. And then by God’s grace, there is reformation. Now think about this in the life of your home. You get your home all nice, neat and tidy, and then the grandkids come over. And so your formation has turned into deformation. And so reformation is send them home with their parents and get out the vacuum, send them home with their parents and call the house cleaner, whatever it takes to get the house back in order.
And you could give this example across all kinds of things that would call attention to our minds and help us to understand this. But in the life of God’s people, formation and deformation And Reformation has been the soup of the day, as it were. You can see it in the life of Israel.
God called a people for himself. He called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. They ended up in Egypt. They come out and they’re in the wilderness. God gives them his laws. They end up in the promised land. They take over that promised land. David becomes king. Solomon builds a temple and everything’s hunky dory, right?
What God has formed because of man’s wickedness or man’s sinfulness or inattention to the word of God, what he formed has become deformed. And so you need prophets and priests and kings to read the word of God, to weep over their sinfulness and to restore or to reform the church. How about in the days up coming up to the ministry of Jesus, you had John the baptizer, the last of the Old Testament prophets, we say. And he went about the countryside of Judea proclaiming, repent, turn, return to God, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Israel had come so far from God’s standard and Jesus was ultimately coming to pay for their sins, but to set his kingdom aright. And so we have ministers like John the Baptist who will come and say, you’re not living right.
You need to stop. You need to turn. You need to correct your course. In the early church, we had apostles and ministers. We had epistles and letters. And you have folks like Paul who will go and build a church, establish a church. They’ll swing back through and fix what’s broken. Or in the case of Corinth or the churches on the Isle of Crete, he would send Titus. Titus was a fixer, you might say, in today’s terms. He could go. And he had the gifts and the graces and the ability, maybe the toughness to look at what was wrong and to fix it so that it was right.
And so in the early church, particularly in the life of Corinth, you had times of formation and deformation and reformation. You get the epistles, the 13 from the apostle Paul and the other ones, and they correct our thinking. They correct our Christian living. They also correct our church practices. And so formation and deformation and reformation are a really big theme throughout the life of God’s people. In the book of Revelation, you have Jesus in chapters two and three. He is the king of the church and he is walking among the churches, walking among the lampstands. And he gives those seven letters. to the seven churches.
Some are doing well, some are not doing well. Some are doing lots of good things and a couple bad things. Some are doing really rotten things. And so God calls each of them out. Here’s what I have against you, he says. And does not Jesus have the right to speak to his church and say, you need to fix, you need to repair, you need to reform. And so those seven letters to the seven churches, here’s what I have against you. Here’s what you can do to fix it. And here’s how I will bless you if you do, but here is how I will curse you if you don’t.
Well, the reformers, you know, a thousand years into the Roman church, took up this work of formation and deformation and reformation, and they saw in the life of the church all kinds of issues, all kinds of problems, but solely the lack of the authority of the word of God in the life of the church. You’ll know the name John Huss burned at the stake in the late 1300s, fighting to put the word of God back in the church. Well, a church that does not want to be bossed around by King Jesus is going to snuff out those who speak ill of them and their work and their labors. There was Wycliffe in England. There was. Luther in Germany, Calvin in Geneva.
And these all had a burning desire in them over the span of a hundred plus years to put the word of God back into the life of the church, back into the hands of believers. And we are heirs of the Reformation. We live in the after darkness, light period. I think many of you are aware of this.
But we live in a time where there are wonderful translations of the Bible. We just handed out a Reformation study Bible. It’s full of wonderful notes, wonderful information to help us understand the Bible. As a minister, I have more resources than I can ever possibly read to help understand the Bible and theology and all that wonderful good stuff. But we are heirs of the Protestant Reformation.
But go back to Corinth for a moment. Go back to Corinth and think of all of Paul’s hard letters, his previous hard visits. Now he’s got to send Titus. Hey Titus, you need to go knock heads. You need to go raise the issues and deal with the issues. And Titus probably says, why did I draw the short straw? This was a tough congregation. This was a difficult people. They were in love with their sin. They were in love with doing church and attempting to live the Christian life without the word of God, without the authority of the scriptures.
And so Paul boasts to Timothy, our passage tells us, and says, Hey, Timothy, I mean, he must’ve been sweetening the deal. If you go there, they’re going to respond. Now Paul said that in faith, Paul believed the best about the Corinthian believers, but he tells Titus, when you go and when you apply the word of God and then the spirit works, there’s going to be a mighty change. You’re going to see it. And I’m sure Titus in the back of his mind was saying, yeah, fat chance here.
He had heard Paul tell of the stories. He had been in prayer meeting as Paul prayed for the problems at Corinth. But a faithful minister does the faithful thing and does his duty. And so he goes. Now, meanwhile, Paul is a little farther north at Troas. It’s in the northwest corner of Asia Minor. It’s north along the sea from Ephesus, where he had ministered. And you know from all our messages and recent studies from Corinthians, Paul had a very difficult time at Ephesus.
He spent three years there and had much fruit, but he also had three years of utter misery. He had upset the silversmiths who made little idols for Artemis. He had upset the local tradesmen and they were unionized and they threw a big 25,000 person protest where they chanted for two straight hours. Long live Artemis or Artemis is God or something of that nature.
And Paul and his companions narrowly escaped with their lives. The town clerk had to speak up and say, if we keep on with this business, the Romans are not going to be happy and our occupation will no longer be free and happy, but it will be one of oppression. And so Paul and his companions likely slipped out of Ephesus, maybe midweek in the quiet hangover morning hours or something like that. Titus goes over to Corinth and Paul goes on up to Troas.
Well, Paul tells us in this passage that he goes up to Troas and he preaches the gospel and it’s going really, really, really well. Preacher’s dream. The words come out of the mouth. The hearts of the people receive, the ears hear, the eyes see, the soul believes, and there is much gospel fruit in Troas.
But Paul is elsewhere in his mind and heart. He’s thinking of the Corinthians. He’s thinking of the harsh letter. He even indicates, I regret being so hard on you in this letter. He’s wondering about Titus. You know, if they tied him up. You know, like parents worry about with the babysitter. He’s worried.
Maybe maybe he’s traveled to Troas, but he fell among robbers or his ship has had trouble at sea or some other traveling issue. Paul is very aware of the spiritual task that Titus is off to do in the spiritual and physical dangers. Nevertheless, he is at Troas preaching. And he’s troubled in mind, he’s troubled in heart, he even says, When he left Troas to come to Macedonia and look for Titus, there was trouble without and there was trouble within. His soul was troubled, but he met physical and personal dangers. It’s likely when the apostle left Troas because of his hard state of his soul, his anxiety that he went over to Philippi.
Remember his ministry at Philippi where many came to faith, but they were put in jail. They were beaten. They had to sneak out in the night and run off to Berea and Thessalonica and then Athens and then Corinth in that first or that second missionary journey. But you can imagine as Paul goes to Philippi and begins to minister, even in the midst of hardship, a sight for sore eyes.
Here comes Titus. Here comes the one he missed. Here comes the one he most wanted to see and the most wanted to hear from. And so he comes to Titus. They visit. How’s it going in Corinth? And Titus gives him really good news. Paul, they love you. Paul, they don’t hate you. Paul, they have received your harsh letter with grace. God has worked in their lives. They’ve repented of their sins. They want to, they want to restore fellowship with you. They long for you to come back and visit. They want to make, amends for all the trouble they have caused. In fact, they are zealous to do this.
Our passage tells us this is the story behind this great difficulty. So in the life of Corinth, in the life of Israel, in the life of our church, in a stretch of history, we all go through periods of formation and deformation and reformation. And what does this reformation look like in light of being confronted with sin, but also by God’s grace turning from that sin. It reminds us a bit of Martin Luther’s troubles during the Protestant Reformation.
Remember, Luther was the kid whose dad wanted him to do well. Luther’s father was a coal miner and he wanted his son to study the law. So Luther goes off to study the law, but he’s traveling home one day and he gets His father would put it, struck in the behind by lightning.
And Luther in great terror says, uh, St. Anne, I believe it was. You Catholics wouldn’t know, right? You former Catholics. Uh, St. Anne, if you get me through this storm, I’ll become a monk. Well, his dad was not too thrilled about that, but off to the monkery, uh, went Luther. And so he goes off to become a monk and he’s studying the Catholic system and he’s always confessing his sins. He’s always figuring that he can’t in any way, please a righteous God. And so he’s so unhappy with God. Why do you mock me? Why do you hold my sins against me? One of the great exercises that Luther went into though, was to read the new Testament in the Greek language.
You understand that for a thousand plus years, And this would be a result of Constantine making Christianity the official religion. Bible gets translated into Latin. And so we speak of the Romanization of the church, the Latinization of the church. And some of you recovering Catholics know all about this and can inform us over lunch or something of how this goes. But Luther began to read the Bible in the New Testament. And he began to understand that the word repent was a change of mind. It was a change of heart.
It was like you men who were driving somewhere with your wife and you’re going this way and she says, no, the wrong way. And if you’re a good stubborn man, you’ll keep going, even though you’ll drive off the face of the earth. You can’t, you can’t repent, right? But a good man, a really good man listens to his wife and says, okay, I’m going the wrong way. I’m going to turn. and go the right way. It’s a 180 degree turn. Repenting is a change of mind, a change of heart. I’m going the wrong way. I’m going to go the right way.
Well, in the Latin, the Roman Catholic would understand the word repent as a verb, do penance. And, you know, you go to the confessional, you sit in the prayer closet, the priest is on the other side and you say, oh, father, I’ve sinned and this is what I’ve done. And he determines whether you have contrition, whether your heart is sufficiently broken. And then he says, you know, say three Hail Marys and go work at the soup kitchen. And supposedly you say you’re Hail Mary’s, you go to the soup kitchen, you do your penance and you’re back in grace. Well, what else did Luther find as he read the Bible? He found that justification was by faith alone.
When we come to faith in God, when we come to faith in Jesus, love how the catechism puts it. He sees us as if we have never sinned or have ever been a sinner, but he also sees us as if we have always obeyed. We stand before a holy God by the obedience of Jesus, not by our obedience, not by our penance, and not even by how much our heart hurts that we have sinned. We simply stand before God because Jesus has lived and obeyed in our place. And so when God sees us as if we’ve never sinned, that’s because our sins are forgiven. When he sees us as if we’ve always obeyed, that’s because the obedience of Jesus is granted to us. And so do we live a life of ongoing repentance? Absolutely.
But we do not do it in a confessional and we do not do it with a human priest. We have full and free access to the throne of grace where we can go and Jesus Christ, the advocate, will hear our confession and receive us and forgive us. for all our unrighteousness. And so we don’t go and hear a list of the penance we must do. We don’t have to work at getting back in God’s good graces.
We have a standing, a legal standing, a right standing, a righteous standing before God. And it’s granted to us by faith. Now, do we still sin? Yes, believers are pardoned of all their sin, but remnant sin remains in us. And you add the world and the flesh The remnant sin, you add the devil together. We are going to, until our dying day, relapse into sinful ways. One of the things Martin Luther put in his 95 Theses, I think it was the very first one, is he says, when the Lord said, repent, it was to be a lifelong repentance.
I hope that every single day you are aware of who God is. I hope that you’re aware of what his standards are. And I hope you’re aware when you sin and when you fall short of God’s glory or you transgress his commands that the Holy Spirit convicts you of those sins and you run to the Lord for grace and for help.
When we are justified by faith through Jesus, we have assurance of God’s pardon. We have a joy in our souls as we read the Bible, as we go to church, as we take the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, our grace increases. We are more and more aware of who we are and what we are not, but what we have in Jesus Christ. And we understand that we go through these relapses, we go through these moments of sin and that the word of God calls us back, but sometimes it’s our brothers and our sisters who call us back. And so you go back here to the life of the Corinthians and you have Paul, the apostle, telling the rest of the church, deal with the center, deal with the sin. You may grieve them for a time, but that grief will will produce repentance. That grief, that punishment, that hardship will produce by God’s grace a repentance.
You know, we hearing lots of politics these days. And if you’re a conservative, you’re told don’t vote for this person. They are soft on crime. Well, and do we want to be a church that is soft on sin? God calls us to uphold his righteous standards. He calls us to show people Jesus, but he calls us to help people when they relapse into sin. And sometimes we have to inflict pain, maybe like a parent does, or like the state has to do in cases of horrible crimes.
And Paul says here that the infliction of pain did its work among the Corinthians. It produced in it a godly grief that brought salvation, not a worldly grief that produces death. Now, you know the difference between godly grief and worldly grief. Worldly grief is I’m sorry that I got caught. It’s a defensiveness. Godly grief says, Father, I’ve sinned against heaven and earth. And will you receive me again? That’s the difference between worldly grief and godly grief.
I know some of you have lived under the the weight of Roman Catholicism, you can never measure up, you can never do all your penance. I know some of you have lived under the toughness of legalism, which is really similar, isn’t it? You need to try harder to do better and to be better. It’s not resting in Jesus, it’s not resting in his finished work. And Luther really was driven mad until he rested in Jesus.
Every Sunday when we do our confession of sin as a church family, as we take some moments for silent and personal confession, you know, we give a little time for you to have silent prayers. Somebody’s asked me one time, how do you know how much time to give us? And I said, well, I know y’all pretty well and I don’t give you long enough. That’s kind of a joke, but what’s my, what’s my little phrase that I say is to introduce the verse brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. You who have received him and rest in him alone for your salvation. Right. That’s a line of demarcation, isn’t it?
We are not going to assure those who are not in Christ that they have been forgiven. You must be in Christ by faith to be forgiven. But those who are in Jesus and the key word is resting. in him alone, you do not have to work. You do not have to run crazy and try to make God happy. We sing songs like nothing in my hands I bring simply to the cross I cling. There’s not a sufficient number of tears or soup kitchen hours that could make God happier with us. It’s simply that we are in Jesus Christ.
And so the life of the believer, the life of the church, is definitely one of formation and deformation, but reformation. But it’s also very personal when we have faith in the Lord and we nurture that faith. It’s sometimes that our faith as it reads the Bible and the Holy Spirit is at work, shows us our sin. It may be during church. Could be during your personal Bible reading. It could be the Holy Spirit prompts you out in your regular life.
You have not measured up to my standard. And so you need to turn from that sin and seek restoration. And so perhaps you go to someone and say, you know, I was really a big rat thing to you. I should have treated you better. I should have spoken to you better or whatever.
And so we go make amends with one another, but we also make amends with the Lord, seeking his help and blessing. And so life is a cycle of faith and repentance. and obedience, and it’s a rinse and repeat as often as needed. Our faith grows, the word shines into our lives, we see our sin, we turn from it, and we seek to obey the Lord. But because of our sin nature, because of our being in love with this world or the desires of our own hearts and other things, we fall back into sin, and it’s good to, again, read the word, see what we believe, be reminded Some of you a couple of years ago listened to Sinclair Ferguson’s podcast that he did for a couple of years, Things Unseen. And one of the things that he spoke about in his, one of his early devotions has stuck with me, and here I’m not gonna be able to recall it and tell you, it really stuck with me though, I’ll tell you.
He said that in the Christian life, we need to name our sins. And we need to name them what God calls them. We don’t need to water it down or whitewash it. You know, there’s words that we used to use in our culture that we have whitewashed because, oh, that’s too harsh. That’s unfair to this community or whatever. But what happens when we downplay sin? Well, it doesn’t appear to be a sin in our mind and heart. But we need to name our sins. We need to name them as God names them in the word. And then we need to understand the equal and righteous virtue. And so if you are impatient, you need patience. If you are unloving, you need love. If you are unkind, you need kindness.
And we could go on and on through the sins that the Bible lists and we for sure struggle with. But here’s the key of this passage I think that we ought to take home. Our sins ought to grieve us. Our sins ought to grieve us not because They can’t be dealt with and we can’t be forgiven of them because they are dealt with and we are forgiven of them in Jesus. But we need to grieve over our sin. We need to hate it. We need to understand the stench of it in the nostrils of God. We need to understand the extent of how our sins hurt other people. We need to understand the madness. Think of the life of King David, the whole Bathsheba incident.
David was bumping along pretty good. He had gotten Bathsheba, he had gotten by with getting her pregnant, he had had her husband killed at the front of the battle, and he was living his best life now, as we say, until Nathan the prophet showed up. And when Nathan shows up, we understand pretty well where David is. David sees no sin in his life. David sees no problem with the way he’s living. I’m the king, I just take care of things.
And then Nathan tells that story and David becomes angry and upset. What should we do with this man who’s stolen another man’s lamb? Well, he ought to be dealt with, David says. And the prick of the heart comes when Nathan, by the authority of God, says, you are that man.
And David grieves. He hates what he’s done. wants to fix it, but there are some things in this life that cannot be fixed. We deal with the implications of our sins sometimes to our grave. But Psalm 51 is penned and David confesses his sin. God restores him, gives him his spirit. And so David can say very well, a contrite heart. Oh Lord, you will not despise.
But another comparison, think of the proverb that speaks of the woman. She’s a woman, a prostitute, and it simply says something like this. She does what she does, she wipes her mouth, and she simply says, I have done no wrong. And I wanna leave y’all with this challenge as we close.
If your heart is hard, If the word of God cannot penetrate your hard heart and you are stuck in your sin, whatever it may be, something great, something small, something in between, perhaps you need the people of God to surround you and knock you upside the head and say, hey, what gives here? Not knock you upside the head, but you know what I mean, with the Bible. But we need people to surround us and say, who in the world do you think you are? living this way, but ultimately we need the Holy Spirit to come upon us and convince us of our sin and our misery so that we hate it and forsake it and turn to a life of obedience. Let’s ask that God would do that in each of us.
Now, our God and father, we have to admit we, we deep down, we know what a mess we are. We know We know our pet sins, our darling sins, the idols that our fingers will not let loose of. And we know also that you are a God who over the time of our Christian lives, you slowly wean us from our love of sin. You slowly pry our fingers off our idols. Day by day, you grow us in grace. We also know that you’ll let us wallow in our sin and our hardship.
And so for each of us now, we pray, Lord, that by your spirit, you would convict us of our sin so that we would bring joy and not sorrow to one another. And we ask that you would hear and help and bless us as we make this prayer in the name of Christ our Savior. Amen.