You can be seated. Please turn in your copy of the scriptures to 2 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians chapter one. Last week, we looked at verses one through 11. We sort of skipped over the verses one and two about the, hello, it’s Paul and all that. We’ve covered those openings so many times. We really focused on verses three through 11 and the idea of suffering. Today, we want to see the beginning of Paul’s defense of his ministry. Really, 2 Corinthians is, as a whole, a defense of his apostolic ministry to a small group of people in the Corinthian church who think he’s, well, unqualified to be their apostle. And so we want to read today verses 12 from chapter one all the way through to verse four.
And before we read, let’s ask for God’s help and his blessing, pray with me. Lord, you promised to give daily bread for our bodies. And we pray now that you would give us bread from heaven to feed our souls. That bread that will last forever, the food from above, give it to us now, we pray in the name of Christ, amen.
From 2 Corinthians 1, beginning at verse 12, we hear Paul say, For our boast is this, the testimony of our conscience that we behaved in the world with simplicity and with godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom, but by the grace of God and supremely so toward you. For we are not writing to you anything other than what you read and acknowledge. And I hope you will fully acknowledge just as you did partially acknowledge us that on the day of our Lord Jesus, you will boast of us as we will boast of you.
Because I was sure of this, I wanted to come to you first so that you might have a second experience of grace. I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia. and to come back to you from Macedonia and have you send me on my way to Judea? Was I vacillating when I planned or wanted to do this? Do I make my plans according to the flesh, ready to say yes, yes, and no, no at the same time?
As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been yes and no. For the son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not yes and no, but in him it is always yes. For all the promises of God find their yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our amen to God for his glory. And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us and who has also put his seal on us and given us his spirit in our hearts as a guarantee. But I call on God to witness against me.
It was to spare you that I refrain from coming again to Corinth. Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy, for you stand firm in your faith. For I made up my mind not to make another painful visit to you, for if I cause you pain, who is there to make me glad but the one whom I have pained? And as I wrote as I did, that when I came, I might not suffer pain from those who should have made me rejoice. For I felt sure all of you, that my joy would be the joy of all of you. For I wrote to you out of much affliction and anguish of heart, and with many tears, not to cause you pain, but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you. Amen. The word of the living God.
You know what a nitpicker is, right? Somebody who nitpicks. Yeah. A nitpicker is a nitpicker. A nitpicker is a person who nitpicks. That’s a circular definition. You can’t, you can’t define it with a, The word, what is a nitpicker? It’s somebody who sees the small things and points them out. What is a nitpicker? Who is a nitpicker? It’s a person who always finds fault and they can’t see the forest for the, maybe the withering trees. The nitpicker is the kid you played Monopoly with growing up and two hours in you’re having a wonderful time.
And they come up with some obscure rule that may or may not be a rule, but they’re pretty sure it’s a rule. And they spend the next hour telling you it’s a rule. And then everybody quits. Uh, what was a wonderful game of monopoly because the nitpicker nitpicked and it got to be no fun.
Uh, you have nitpickers in your life. Uh, do not confess sins or name names, but you know what nitpicking is and it can drive you crazy. Well, we’ve got nitpickers, critical people, fault finders in the church of God at Corinth. They’re majoring on the minors and by minor things, we mean things that don’t even really matter that much in the span of the whole picture of church. There’s always something more to a nitpicker. There’s always something more to the person who is pointing out these things.
Think of, think of Judas. Remember Judas held the money bag. Judas was the treasurer of the little band of disciples. And remember the woman who so wonderfully anointed Jesus for his upcoming death. She used that expensive jar of nard, of perfume, of oil, and she lavishly covered him with it. And what did Judas the nitpicker say? It’s worth 300 denarii. It could have been sold. And the bubble over his head said, and put in the money bag. But what did he say outwardly? And put in the treasury to help the poor. What a, what a, what a godly nitpicker he turned out to be. Um, why this waste?
He says, well, at Corinth, you have a little small teeny faction of nitpickers. Uh, remember, remember the, the factions, some follow Paul, some follow Apollo, some follow Peter or Cephas, others follow Jesus Christ and the anti Paul, the anti Paul faction, they have finally got something on him. They have a fault in Paul that gives them right to condemn him, gives them the right, at least they think, to say negative things about him and say, you know what? All is lost, Paul is no good.
Now remember the life and ministry of Jesus. His whole ministry, there were the Pharisees and the scribes and the teachers of the law, and they would send people out into the countryside from Jerusalem to watch him. and to see if he would trip up and make a mistake. And even up to the point of his death during passion week, during the week of the day of atonement and the year Jesus died, they were looking for a way to trap him. They were looking for a way to nitpick and find fault with Jesus so that they could do away with him.
And so Paul’s at this point with the Corinthian church. this little faction of people, the anti-Paul people, have said, now we’ve got you. We have seen who you are, and we have seen what you have done, and no more Paul. So 2 Corinthians as a whole is a defense of his ministry, but here we see a particular defense, and hopefully as you followed along and read these passages, these verses, you thought, how did he go from defending changing his mind about travel to saying everything is yes in Jesus. Leave it to Paul, leave it to the theologian, leave it to the great apostle to do this wonderful and masterful things.
And so Paul changes his travel plans. He was gonna go from one missionary journey into the next. He was gonna swing through Macedonia. That’s like Philippi and Thessalonica and Berea. He’s gonna collect some money for the Jewish population back at Jerusalem. And then he’s going to swing through Corinth and see them and collect money. Then he’s going to go back through Macedonia, back to Judea. And what he decides to do instead, not go to Corinth on the way, because if he came to Corinth on the way, it was not going to be pretty.
It was going to be ugly. He was going to come with a stick. As he says, I wanted to come and bring joy to you and not pain. I wanted to have a ministry of grace among you and not a ministry of pain. He had already written some nasty grams. And he had already visited once and apparently took them out to the woodshed. So he says, I’m going to change my plans. Well, what did the nitpicker say?
We got you now. You’re a plan changer. You said you were coming. And now you’re not. So we’ll discredit you. Bad Paul. Bad Paul the plan changer. No good Paul the plan changer. See everybody? We’ve been telling you Paul bad. Now you know. And so Paul writes his little defense. And he gives a master class in this.
Perhaps you have been under criticism before. Criticism, not always negative. You know, we read a food critic and decide whether to go to a restaurant or not. We read sanitation grades and decide to go to a restaurant or not. Criticism can be good. It points out things that are just observable. We usually have a negative view of criticism. But perhaps what we hear today can help us if we pass through a stretch of being under the ministry of nitpickers or being under the watchful eye of those who wish us ill.
And so they look for a foothold in our lives. If you are a Christian, if you’re a servant of God, it’s just going to come. So how do we handle it? Well, we first want to think about the ministry of a man, the ministry of a man. Paul is an apostle, which means he is sent by God into the world to proclaim the goodness of God in Christ Jesus. He is sent into the world by God with a message, a message he cannot change and a message that he must give no matter what. And so like Paul, every believer comes into this world with gifts with calling by God to be saved. We come with gifts and graces, and in some cases, we come with training to do a certain work of the Lord. Now, think about ministers for a moment. Here’s Paul defending his ministry.
Sunday night, last week, our Presbytery installed a new minister at a church south of here, and a couple of us caught wind that The elders and deacons there were trying to nitpick him already. Been on the job three months, nitpicking. We want to know where he is at every moment of the day. And so some of us got wind of it and said, you can’t afford to have that privilege. I mean, think if you kept a lawyer on retainer, cost you thousands of bucks. Well, we want to know what we’re getting for our money. And we had to say, look, this guy’s a professional. You’ve hired a professional. That means he can self-start. That means he can keep to-do list. He can do his job. And by the way, being a minister is a job that just doesn’t always be, you know, it’s not always nine to five.
And so one of the talks at the installation service was Hebrews 13, chapter 13, verses seven and 17, which basically in the Brian paraphrase is, okay, church people, make it easy for your pastor to be your pastor. And what we were trying to say is, and don’t micromanage. And that was sort of the word. I didn’t know all this was going on until afterwards. And I said, what was going on when the person gave this little speech, but the ministry of man, uh, is just that it’s the ministry of man. Yes. Calling yes. Gifts. Yes. Graces. Yes. Sometimes training. Yes. The person is a professional Paul, the best of the best. Uh, there’s a set of goals.
There are the biblical verbs, you know, preach and teach and minister and pray and all that. There are traditions that pop up in our church cultures. So the ministers to preach and teach and probably jiggle the handle on the leaky toilet, uh, those sorts of things that’s not in the job description, but it must be done.
So here’s Paul missionary journey to. going from city to city, making a collection for the poor. He’s going to go to Macedonia, uh, collect, but he’s going to come back to Corinth where he ministered about 18 months. They know Paul, they deep down know him. And think about that with critics. When they bring up something, they know generally what’s true. They just got to find the one little false thing and sort of highlight it. And so here it’s Paul, you’re a travel plan changer. I mean, good gracious, if that’s the worst, what should we do?
But Paul has preached to them and many of them were convinced of their sin and misery and converted to faith in Christ through the Holy Spirit and to salvation. And then he spent all those months comforting them, all those months building them up in the faith, teaching them day by day. He even sent Timothy, he sent Apollos, he sent others in his absence to keep building them up and establishing them in joy and in faith. and in service to Christ as the church was established there.
So the ministry of man is wonderful. It is, it has its limitations. That’s secondly, what we want to think of today, the ministry of man, but also the limitations of man. Did you catch how Paul began his little thing here? He said, Hey folks, I’m going to boast. I’m going to boast here.
It is a rhetorical way of saying, uh, by the end of this letter, I’m hoping, that you’re gonna do what I’ve asked you to do, because it’ll be the right thing to do if you’re thinking reasonably. And so he says, I boast to you that in my conscience, in my heart of hearts and deep down in my soul before God, and even says in this passage, I call God before you as my witness. And so if I’m lying, that’s not good.
Call God as my witness. My conscience tells me that when I was in your midst, I behaved before you by God’s grace with simplicity and with godly sincerity. There was no earthly wisdom. There was no man-made ministry. In my one-on-ones with various ones of you, in my public ministry, in the letters I’ve sent, in my subsequent visit, I, before God, with God as my witness and in my conscience, believe I did what was best. I had to change plans, but I believe that that was even doing best.
You know, there’s something about Paul here that we ought to consider. We ought to consider, let’s just say in our everyday living, we have the James principle. Remember what James taught early Christians? Don’t wake up in the morning and say, I’m gonna do this, and I’m gonna do this, and I’m gonna do that. you need to salt your talk with, if the Lord wills, we will go here and we will go there and we will trade and make a business. And so a believer has to make plans. Yes. We got to buy trip insurance because sometimes plans fail, but we make our plans confident that we are doing the right thing in our conscience before the Lord.
But we also live this side of Eden and life East of Eden means train delays. It means planes don’t fly. It means cars don’t start. It means children get sick. It means ministry sometimes cannot happen like we wish. We make plans and we trust the Lord. And it’s always after the fact that we can look back and see that God has a better plan. Sometimes he works right with us. You make a plan, you work a plan, you pray for a plan, it goes off without a hitch. But sometimes there are changes. And here Paul’s travel plan essentially goes like this.
I’m going to come see you Corinthians on the way to Macedonia. And I’m going to remind you of the offering. And I’m going to help you through some hardships. We’ll swing up to Macedonia, you know, to Berea and Thessalonica to Philippi, going to minister to them, probably going to leave Timothy and a few behind to minister to y’all going to get the Jerusalem offering collected from them. And I’m going to swing back through minister to you more. And then I want you to put some change in the plate. and some wind in my sails so that I can go back to Jerusalem with an offering to our suffering brethren there in that holy city.
And a wise person would say, you know, it’s probably good Paul didn’t come. It’s probably good he didn’t come because he would have come angry. He would have come hot. He would have said some stuff we needed to hear, but we would not have been ready by God’s grace to receive it. And so it is good that Paul didn’t come.
It is good that we. were given some grace to grow up in our faith before he came. And that’s apparently what happened. When he does come, when he does visit with them, it’s a sweet visit. God, the Holy Spirit, by the word, by the ministry of some who were there, had calmed down the nasty situation there at Corinth. So if Paul would have come, it would have been bad news. But since he changes his plans and comes later, But you can, you know, you say to your critics, if you must answer them, you don’t always have to just say, look, I did what I thought was best in the sight of God.
It’s never good enough for a nitpicker, a critic, but that’s what you might say. So we’ve got the ministry of man. It’s feeble. We’ve got the limitations of man, and there are many, but the center of this passage is the fullness of Jesus Christ. Paul says to them, what, what are you saying? I’m a yes, yes. And I know no person at the same time. How do we say it in the South? He talks out of both sides of his mouth, right? We talk about double talk, double speak. We talk about making a commitment and backing out. And we live in a culture where people will say yes and immediately turn right around and say no. Somebody was telling me recently about the generation coming up.
They’ll even go so far as to get a job, but not show up on the first day because they changed their mind. How they have that luxury, I do not know. I was taught that your goal in life was to get a job, keep a job, get a paycheck, go get that paycheck, put it in the bank and rinse and repeat the rest of your life. How people in this economy have the luxury to say no to a job.
But that’s our culture. It’s a yes, No culture. But as believers, we are reminded of the teaching of Jesus. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. We don’t take rash vows. We don’t make commitments we cannot keep. Now, there are times we make commitments and we cannot keep them because of circumstances. And in the providence of God and in the wisdom of God, perhaps we are prevented from keeping them. And life in this world that’s not perfect, we’ve got to remember that.
But with Jesus, he is yes. With Jesus, he is the amen. I was doing a little thinking of the word amen. And my guess, you have to tell me later if you think this is a good guess, a good estimate, probably the most said word in the world throughout human history is the word amen. It goes back to the Hebrew language and meant, yes, so be it. May it be so. It was a word that meant firmness and sureness. We say at the end of our prayers, we say it probably more from the New Testament side, the Greek side, but we say amen, verily, truly, when we say our prayers. We want our prayers to be made so, and we pray in Jesus’ name.
And all that comes from what Paul is saying here. that at the center of the Bible, God makes promises. At the center of the Bible, God makes covenants. At the center of the Bible, God commits himself to us. And while we are covenant breakers, we are law breakers. God is a covenant keeper. And how does God best show that he will keep his covenant? He sends his own son, the yes. He sends his own only begotten son, the amen. He sends Jesus to the cross to keep that everlasting covenant. We can’t keep covenant.
In fact, if you remember the story of Abraham pretty early on, he’s looking up at the stars and saying, God, I don’t have a kid. He’s looking out the night at his tent and saying, you know, God is great. All these promises you’ve made. Hadn’t seen anything happen yet. I’m getting old. My wife is barren. And did y’all catch Psalm 113?
What does God do? He lifts up the low and he gives barren women children. Think of Hannah and Samuel. Think of Ruth and the father of David. Think of all the places in the scripture where God lifted up those cast down and he gave those who were empty, he gave them fullness. Well, all those promises are made through Jesus.
And when Abraham is wondering, you know, how’s it going to be? I get a kid in my old age. God says, okay, take some birds, take some animals, lay them out. And we’re going to cut a covenant. I’ll be your God. You’ll be my people. I’ll give you offspring. I’ll give you grapes and grandkids. Remember covenant promises.
And so Abram lays it all out. He shoes the birds away. And then God causes Abram into a deep sleep. And while he’s asleep, God comes and cuts that covenant. And he cuts those animals into two. And it’s if God is saying, Abraham, you couldn’t keep this covenant. It’s better that you’re asleep. It’s better that you’re snoozing. It’s better that you’re snoring.
And I’ll keep this covenant even to the point that I’ll give up my only son, if that’s what it takes. And that is what it took. And so while Paul is arguing with the Corinthians and saying, look, I changed my plans and believe me, you didn’t want me to come, but that’s their foothold. He’s a plan changer, bad person. Don’t listen to him. His gospel is false because he’s a plan changer. He says it was better that it didn’t come.
And besides that human ministers and their limitations only point us to Jesus. And that’s the wonderful thing. Maybe the comfort we have as parents, It’s the comfort I have as a minister. It’s the comfort I think the elders have. We are insufficient for this.
In fact, later Paul will say we have treasures of God and jars of clay, but it’s the treasure that matters. And so the nitpickers get a dose of the gospel. I may not be able to keep my travel plans, but Jesus is the center of the Bible. and all the covenant promises of God, all that he has made over to you, all that he has given to you, it is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And so the fullness of Christ is at the center of this passage.
Now I’m gonna jump ahead for a teeny moment. We didn’t read verses five through, yeah, five through 11, I think it was, five through, yeah, five through 11 about the man that’s supposed to be forgiven. But the principle is gonna come up when we look at that passage.
If a man is forgiven and Jesus has given him a yes of forgiveness, can you say no to him? Remember the parable of the man who owed like three lifetimes of salary and the king said, where’s my money pay up? Can’t do it. Well, you’re going to prison. Oh, please, please, please don’t put me in prison. Okay, you’re forgiven. He goes out and finds the guy that owed him 20 bucks. Oh, you can’t pay me. beat him and put him in prison? Well, what does the king do when he finds out? You didn’t forgive, I forgave you, bad man going to prison.
So what’s the economy of the gospel? If Jesus says yes, what are we obligated to say to those who have received Jesus? Yes, we’re obligated to say yes, we’re to imitate Jesus and his fullness. More about that one later. Last thing we wanna think about is the providence of God. I’ve mentioned it a time or two, What do we do with disappointment? What do we do when someone has said yes to us, and then they have to say, no, you all know there are times in your life we make a plan, our conscience is clear, we’ve prayed about it, it’s the wise thing to do, we have the budget, we have the time, we’re gonna do this thing, and then life just falls apart.
And that’s when the critics come out. Oh, you’re a plan changer. You said, and now you’re not gonna do it. And so they got a beef with you. And usually there’s something a little more to it, like with Judas or like with these people at Corinth. What do we do when criticism comes and maybe criticism is legitimate?
Think about David when he’s walking along the roadway early in his ministry as God’s chosen one, and there’s Shimei throwing rocks. Remember Shimei? He’s like the Ernest T. Bass of the Old Testament. He’s chucking rocks at David. And what did David’s mighty men say? Hey, you know, they talk like mafia, you know, we can put them in concrete, right? We can make him disappear like Jimmy Hoffa. And what does David say?
He says, no, it could be that the Lord wants to teach me something. It could be his criticism of me is correct. And so when criticism comes, we don’t want to say I’m a servant of the Lord. No, thank you. We want to take to heart. The person could be right.
The person could be dead wrong and still right at the same time, how that works. But we ought to take to heart, what is God showing me? What is God teaching me? What is the truth in what they say? And we should take it to heart. We should trust that sometimes the Lord uses means and sometimes they’re painful. And we should learn what God has for us. So what are we to think of a passage like this?
Paul has simply changed his travel plans. These people are not upset for the reasons you think. This isn’t like grandma and grandpa said they were coming and now they’re not coming and you got six disappointed grandkids and Santa’s not coming. This is not that.
They just found something to nitpick. So what are we to think of it? Life this side of Eden, there will always be this sort of thing. And you’ve got to press on. You can’t stop. What did I learn in seminary from? It’s coming to my mind. Don’t stop for every barking dog. That’s it. Sometimes you’ve got to press on. And you in various situations of life, maybe you do public things, maybe you have a job where you are over people, whatever, you will have nitpickers. You will disappoint people.
But one of the great blessings we have from a passage like this is every promise of God is yes in Jesus and amen in Jesus. And so we take comfort in that. Let’s ask for God’s blessing. Father, we pray that the words of Paul would comfort us. We live life in a world that can’t always be yes, yes, yes. Sometimes it is no. It can be crushing, but we remember that every promise of God will be fulfilled in that perfect place called heaven, and we look forward to it. Make our consciences clear. Help us to give our best word when we can, but also to refrain when we don’t believe we can so that others have confidence in us. We now put all our faith in Jesus. There is none like him. So help us and bless us in this hour. We pray in his name, amen.