Faith Working Through Love

August 9 2020

2 Corinthians 5:6-21

         Well, I’m now officially 59 years old having celebrated my birthday just yesterday. Now to treat myself this past week I decided to check in at a wonderful resort called Aultman for a little R and R. It seems that even after some fifty eight plus years I haven’t experienced all the wonders of God’s great creation so this past while I got to try out what its like to have an abscess. Let me just say its not a lot of fun. I did discover though a level of pain I had yet to experience so its always good to stretch yourself. So after this pain level got to the point I could no longer function it was off to the ER to have it dealt with. Of course it always seems like things take longer than they should when your at the hospital but the truth is things went smoothly and they were able to take care of it right there in the ER so that was great. But after the procedure was over there came the dreaded words from the attending nurse no one wants to here and that is “we have to keep you overnight for observation”. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that hospitals are not great places for sleepovers. I shouldn’t really complain, I had a nice room all to myself but still the thought that kept running through my mind is that I would have rather been home. I guess it was the little things like having to have a clear liquid diet plan for dinner when you haven’t eaten for over twenty four hours. I mean nothing hits the spot like clear chicken broth and a cup of tea topped off by a Jello cup. Yum! And then there was the fact that the my bed had no pillow. It is weird to try and sleep with your head lying right on the hard mattress. And of course being that it’s a hospital getting woke up at three in the morning to get your vitals taken and answer a bunch of questions is just part of the fun. So needless to say by the next morning the only thing I could think of was when am I getting out of here.  It’s probably a universal feeling that when you find yourself in the hospital the one place you long to be is home. There is something about the place you call home that touches your emotions and tugs at your heartstrings like nothing else.

         It’s funny but we don’t often think of Paul as a sentimental guy but it turns out he had the same longing for home that all of the rest of us do. For him, life here in the here and now was like an overnight stay at the hospital, perhaps necessary, certainly needed but still not the same as being home. This is what Paul seems to be reflecting on when in todays scripture he writes about being at home in the body. When Paul speaks about being at home in the body  he is speaking about life in the here and now where let’s face it things are not as they should be. Speaking about life in the body is a reminder of the weakness of our flesh which causes life to be rather uncomfortable. As Paul says he would rather be at home with the Lord. As we heard in last weeks scripture, from the beginning of this same fifth chapter of second Corinthians, Paul spoke of how when this earthly dwelling is destroyed we have a building from God, a house not made with hands eternal in the heavens. When we read verses like these in the Bible we have a tendency to think more about just what kind of house God is building instead of rejoicing that we get to dwell with God forever. It is this dwelling with God that is what is important not the place where we will be dwelling at. Paul is looking forward to the day when heaven and Earth will collide  and come together in a great unity and the separation caused by sin and death will not be remembered. One day our future hope is that the whole world will be God’s home; we have certainty that we will see this reality. Yet what we learn in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews is that by faith we can make what we hope for a reality here today. This is exactly what Jesus taught his disciples on the night he was betrayed. In the fourteenth chapter of the gospel of John, We hear Jesus tell us, “If anyone  loves me, and keeps my word and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.” This is how we experience what we hope for, an eternal dwelling with God, in the here and now of today. When we keep God’s word this is when Jesus tells us we are at home with God we just have to hold fast by faith and know that this is true.

         Now what is interesting about what Jesus teaches us here is that what Jesus tells us to do, to keep his word,this is the very same thing Paul taught at the beginning of the fourth chapter of second Corinthians as to how we are to love God with all of our heart. There Paul tells us that we have this treasure in clay jars which echoes the truth found in the one hundredth and nineteenth Psalm, the eleventh verse which tells us that we are to treasure God’s word in our heart. To keep the word of Jesus is to treasure the word of Jesus and when we do this then by faith we are living out our eternal hope of dwelling with God.So knowing all of this what we discover is that in this fifth chapter of second Corinthians Paul is still unfolding the affects of the new covenant that God has brought about, the covenant ratified by the blood of Jesus. It is this new covenant that will cause people to at long last keep the commandments of God. Last week we learned how the new covenant causes us to love God with all of our heart, to love God with all of our soul or life and to love God with all of our resources. Today, in this fifth chapter of second Corinthians I believe Paul is teaching us just how the new covenant makes it possible for us to keep the commandment that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus taught in the twenty second chapter of Matthew, when asked which is the greatest commandment of the Law, that the greatest commandment is that we shall love the lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our strength. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second like is like it Jesus continued: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Now, for me it has always been confusing as to how the second commandment is like the first but here in our scripture Paul begins to make it very clear just how this is so. Paul is teaching that in order to be able to love our neighbor as ourselves we have to begin in our hearts at the very control center of ourselves. And we begin with our hope, the very anchor of our soul which is that we long to be at home with God which seems like an unusual place to begin when we we are trying to love others. But this hope leads us to have faith because it is faith which makes what we hope for a reality in the here and now. 

         So it is faith that opens the door to us living a life where we make our home with God. Now, what we may not realize is that in the Jewish thought of which Paul was a part of there were two different levels of faith. The first level of faith was called emunah. This was a faith in God’s word, a statement of belief. It is where you read in God’s word that God is love and you believe this is true. The second type of faith is called bitachon. This is the faith that results in confidence. Because I know that God is love I know that God loves me, personally, and because I know and have experienced this love I now trust and have confidence in God. Emunah faith opens the door for us to make our home with God and once we make our home with God and live day by day with God, the truth about God that we have faith in becomes experienced by us and we grow in our confidence of God. This is what Paul is speaking of when he write that he is always of good courage not just once but twice in this brief passage of scripture. Paul is saying that his faith is bitachon faith an experienced faith, a confident faith.

         The result of this bitachon faith is that we come to love and cherish our relationship with God. When what Paul writes is translated to us that we make our aim to please God, much is lost as to what Paul is trying to tell us. In the original Greek the word Paul uses is one that says that we are to honor the one we love which reveals that these actions are to flow out of our heart not our mind. So when Paul speaks of the last judgment where everyone will receive what is due for what they have done in the body and how this is the ground of our fear of the Lord what we have to remember this fear is not the fear that we won’t measure up when we appear before the Judge but rather this fear is the awe and worship of the God we love this is what propels our every thought and action. It is our worship of God which insures our eternal security when we at least see the one we love face to face.

         So just as loving God begins by our loving God with our heart, so our loving our neighbor begins by loving God with our heart because when we love God we will want to do what honors God, what pleases God. We live with the understanding that there is a day of judgment which tells us that God has a standard by which we will be judged and that standard is the love of our neighbor. In our hearts then we have a desire to honor and worship God with the way we live by loving others. This desire we have  comes from our making our home with God and daily experiencing life with him.

         Now just as the great commandment began with loving God with all of our heart and then is followed by loving God with our soul or life this is what we find Paul begins to write about next is loving God and others with our life. Paul writes that the love of Christ controls us and why this is so is that when Christ died all have died.We have to stop here and really think about what Paul is saying here. The death of Christ was the end of something, the end of the way life is defined. What happened on the cross is that Christ condemned sin in the flesh. In other words, in our natural life apart from God we live by the power of flesh listening to our desires and lusts instead of listening to the word of God. The result is that the flesh comes under the power of sin and the wages of sin is death. This is what was realized that day when Jesus died upon the cross because in Jesus we saw one who did not live by the power of the flesh but instead lived through the power of God’s Holy Spirit. Instead of desiring to preserve his flesh he laid down his life as an act of the greatest love of all. And as Paul continues in the fifth chapter of second Corinthians, this act of love for us by Christ upon the cross is to change the way we live. This is why Paul goes on to say that now, we are to no longer regard anyone according to the flesh because living according to the flesh is a dead end way of life. Paul said at one time he regarded Jesus according to the flesh because this is the only life that Paul knew until he met Jesus. When Paul met the risen Christ on that road to Damascus, he met one who was alive through the power of God’s Holy Spirit.  What Paul discovered in the risen Christ was one who had been set free from the body of death, a body under the control of sin. The question then becomes how does this life of Christ come to live in us? The answer is that the life of Christ lives in us by faith. Do you remember how Paul described this faith of Jesus, he tells us that it is a faith in a God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence that which does not exist. It is one thing though to believe this about God with an emunah faith as something we hold as true and it is another to experience the truth of this statement of belief personally, to know this truth with a bitachon faith. This is what Paul is telling us must happen when he says that in Christ we become a new creation. When Paul states that the new has come the wording in Greek is that something has been brought into existence, a new being has been created. This wording Paul uses is the almost exact wording of what we have faith in God to do. So by placing our faith in God he creates us anew, a new birth where now we our life is a life empowered by the Holy Spirit.

         It is amazing that in order to love our neighbor we must first love God with our heart, to keep his word to have faith in his word. When we have faith in the truth of what God says about himself we come to make our home with God and in doing so we experience for ourselves those very same truths we believe in. Through our life with God we come to love God because we have experienced his great love for us and our desire is to honor him and worship him through all we say and do. In our remembrance that one day we will have to answer for our life in this body God has given us, we realize God has standards for the way we treat each other and that standard is love that same love we have experienced in our life with him. It is when we realize that we are to love in the same manner as God that we also realize that our body is under control of sin, it is a body of death. It is in this moment that we like Paul cry out, “Who can save us from this body of death? The answer as to who can save us is Jesus. It is Jesus upon the cross who revealed to us that our life in the flesh is death. It is Jesus risen from the grave that reveals to us that a life in the power of the Holy Spirit is the life that is eternal. In order to experience this life we have to take what we believe to be true, that our God is a God who gives life to the dead and brings into existence that which does not exist and experience this for ourselves, to be a new creation who lives by the power of the Spirit. Only as we live by the Spirit are we able to fulfill our desire to live a life that honors the one who loves us and the one we love.

         Paul goes on to describe the kind of life that honors God and the word he uses to describe it is reconciliation. The word in its root form means to come together in order to be friends. God in Christ, Paul tells us was making us his friends and we now have this same ministry, to go and help people become friends with God. This is what Paul writes, that God is counting on us to make his desire to be friends with everyone become a reality through us. You see, it is God, the one who at one time we were opposed to because of our life lived by the power of the flesh, he is the one who reached out to us in love at the great cost to him, the death of his Son Jesus.He did this all just to be our friend and not only our friend but the friend of the whole world. This is what Paul meant when he wrote that it was for us, God made Jesus to die upon the cross, the tree believed to be under the curse of God, even though Jesus was without sin, all so that in doing so we might at long last become righteous. This term “righteous” points us back to Paul’s statement about the day of judgment because it is righteousness is the standard God is expecting. So we have to ask just what does righteousness look like? Well, in the twenty fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells us of the judgment day. There he tells us that righteousness looks like feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, it is welcoming the stranger and clothing the naked. It is taking the time to visit those who are sick and those who are in prison. Do you see how we began our journey of loving our neighbor by loving God with all of out heart, believing in the word of God and then we continued by loving God with our life, a new life God created for us which is able to love as God loves us, and we end by loving God with all of our resources, taking what God has given to us and using those resources as a tangible expression of God’s desire to be friends with all people and an expression of God’s desire for all people to be friends with one another. This is how God’s new covenant ratified by the blood of Christ empowers us to be people capable of loving others as God has first loved us. This is the good news we have to share.To God be the glory!

  

For the love of God

 August 2 2020

Corinthians 4:7-18, 5:1-5

         This past while, the news has been about the death of John Lewis. Now, sadly I had no idea just who John Lewis was or what he did except that he was a congressman from Georgia. So, instead of remaining ignorant I decided to read up on him and what I found was really fascinating. He was an early civil rights activist participating in peaceful nonviolent demonstrations against the racist practices in the south during the nineteen sixties. When he was twenty one he joined with the Freedom Riders, seven white students and six black students who were going to ride from Washington D. C. To New Orleans. Now, to us this sounds like no big deal but back then, in the south, interstate bus travel was segregated even though the Supreme Court had struck down this practice as being unconstitutional. So, the Freedom Riders were going to do what was lawful yet unacceptable to the people through the states that they were riding through.  Lewis was attacked and beaten during his first ride. In Mississippi he was imprisoned, and in Birmingham the Riders were beaten with pipes, chains, baseball bats and stones. In Montgomery, Lewis was hit over the head with a crate and left bleeding and unconscious on the floor of the bus station. Two years later when he was elected Chairman of the student Non-Violent Committee, he had been arrested twenty four times for participating in peaceful non-violent demonstrations.

         Now, what gets to me when I read the story of John Lewis and countless others who marched in the sixties for civil rights is how they were willing to allow themselves to be beaten and bloodied, to be ill-treated and imprisoned not just once but over and over again and not once do you read that they ever retaliate. I mean, I honestly don’t know if I could do that. I often wonder if I could participate in a non-violent protest because even after years of knowing Jesus I still am afraid that after a couple of hits I would want to start hitting back. I bring up John Lewis because it is easy for us to read accounts of Paul’s trials and think that was Paul he was some super Christian who was able to suffer for the cause of Christ but thank goodness that God doesn’t expect that of me. But then throughout history there comes along people like John Lewis and Martin Luther King and those martyrs of the faith who are willing to suffer for the cause of justice and they cause us to wonder if Paul was on to something, that being willing to suffer was maybe a willingness for all of us should work towards. This is what our scripture today is I believe trying to tell us.

         When we read today’s scripture it is a little hard, at first, to figure out where Paul is headed and why he is writing what he does. I mean we finish up a section on the glory of God in our life which comes through knowing God. The reason Paul is writing about knowing God is that he is reminding the church at Corinth about the new covenant of which he is a minister of that covenant. He writes about how this covenant is written not on stone tablets as was the first covenant but is instead written on tablets of human hearts. This is exactly how Jeremiah prophesied that the new covenant God would make with his people was going to be. Yet this was just the beginning of what Jeremiah foresaw because he also said that because of this new covenant no longer would people have to teach others to know God because with the coming of the new covenant everyone would know God. When we know God then we, like Moses, know that God’s glory is his name, his unchangeable character, which is that he is a God who is slow to anger, a God of steadfast love and faithfulness, willing to forgive transgressions, iniquities and sin. How do we know this about God? We know that God is slow to anger, that he is a God of steadfast love and faithfulness, a God willing to forgive because Jesus went to the cross and there at the cross we personally came to know God because it was there we met the God who was slow to get angry with us, a God whose steadfast love was given to us, a God who was faithful to us when we had no faith at all in him and a God who forgives because it was my sins and your sins that were forgiven through the blood shed by Jesus at the cross. It is this knowledge that we have been forgiven much at a great cost to God that causes our hearts to respond in love to God.As God had first loved us we love him; as God was first faithful to us we become faithful to him. As we saw God’s glory at the cross when Jesus became a ransom for many, we also realize that God has raised us up to that same glory so we might reign in life through serving even the least of these.

         This brings us to todays scripture which begins with Paul speaking of  “this treasure in jars of clay”. What is not clear is just what is Paul referring to when he speaks of “this” but what we do know is that this treasure is in jars of clay. Now, in the Old Testament this metaphor of clay jars is fairly common. In Isaiah sixty four, verse eight we read “But know O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the works of your hand.” Jeremiah also uses the image of God being the potter and we the clay in his hands. In the eighteenth chapter of Jeremiah, we read “ O, house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? Declares the Lord. Behold, like clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” God explains further the point of he being the potter and Israel by saying, “If at any time I declare concerning a nation or kingdom that I will pluck up and destroy it, and if that nation concerning which I have spoken turns from its evil , I will relent of the disaster I intend to do to it” So, God as the potter has the right to pluck up any of his clay pots that did not turn out as he had planned and break that pot. Now what we must also know is just what is the evil that would cause God to do this? God tells Jeremiah that the evil that Israel must turn from is the evil of not listening to the voice of God. So, the clay jar was meant to be a vessel where God’s voice, his word could be found. This is exactly what the Psalmist writes in Psalm one nineteen, verse eleven tells us: “I have treasured your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” So considering all of this I believe that what Paul is speaking of when he says we have this treasure in jars of clay is that God’s word is to be treasured within our hearts. It is only by the word of God kept safe within our hearts that we have the knowledge of the glory of God. God gives us his word which tells us who he is and God’s actions verify that God is a God of integrity.

         As great as it is for us to understand this about what Paul is telling us, I believe that there is also one more piece of the puzzle that we must also understand. When Paul began his letter, he began writing about the new covenant. The importance of the new covenant was that, now with its coming, the law of God would be on the hearts of the people of God and they would be able to fulfill the law. Jesus taught that the law can be summed up with two commands the first being that we are to love God with all of our heart, with all of our soul or life and with all of our strength or resources. The second is that we should love our neighbor as our self. So when we begin to understand that Paul in speaking about a treasure in jars of clay is pointing to God’s word being treasured in our hearts it isn’t a big leap to see that Paul is now not only speaking about the new covenant but also what effects the new covenant has on his life. Paul wouldn’t be much of a minister of the new covenant if that covenant had no affect on him. So here Paul is writing about how, now, with the new covenant, Paul is able to love God with all of his heart, with all of his soul and with all that God has given him. Paul tells us in todays scripture that he treasures God’s word because it shows that the surpassing power belongs to God. Pauls wording echoes what is written in the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy where Moses tells the people of Israel that God fed them in the desert for forty years to teach them that people do not live by bread alone but by every word that God speaks. Then, further, Moses tells them to not forget the words of God  and to not forget what has God has done because when they live in the Promised Land they would be tempted to say in their hearts, that it was their power has gotten them all that I have. Paul in saying is that he is just a simple clay pot does so to point out how powerless he really is. I mean just how much power does a clay pot have? Paul wants people to know that the power he relies upon comes from God. And Paul is also saying that it most certainly God’s word that is his life. The reason that when Paul was afflicted he was not not crushed and the reason that he was perplexed, but he was not driven to despair was that he had faith in the word of God. And it was faith in God’s word that meant that yes, when Paul  was persecuted, hunted down by his enemies he could know beyond a doubt that he was never alone because God’s word told him that his God would be with him through it all. And, it was faith in God’s word that was the reason that even though Paul would often find himself knocked down he knew that he would never be destroyed because he had faith in the God who can raise the dead. 

         So, it is evident that Paul loved God with all of his heart, treasuring God’s word in his heart knowing he was alive because of every word of God. What we have to ask is then is Paul going to address loving God with all of his soul, his very life? Well, this just naturally follows what he has to say about loving God with all of his heart. What we have to understand is just what does it mean to love God with our life? To love God with our whole life means that we must not demand that God save us from death. It means that we must love God even if loving God means laying down our life if God asks us to do so. So, when Paul says he carries in his body the death of Jesus what he is saying is that he is willing to lay down his life to do the will of his Heavenly Father just as Jesus was willing to do so. Paul wrote in the second chapter of Philippians that even if he was to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of their faith. And in the third chapter he further adds that he wanted to share in the sufferings  of Jesus so that he might also be like Jesus in his death. This is what it means to love God with your life. Paul tells us in todays scripture that he was always given over to death for the sake of Jesus, willing to give his life to do the will of God so that Jesus might be glorified. Paul loved God with such intensity that he was willing to not only to love him with his heart but he was also willing to give God back the life God first gave to him. Paul could do so because of the faith that Paul had in the word of God that Paul treasured in his heart. This was the same faith that Jesus had in his Heavenly Father that moved him to yield to his heavenly Father’s will, praying not my will but your’s be done. This is a faith in a God who gives life to the dead, a God who brings into existence those things which do not exist. Paul believed that the God who raised the Lord Jesus would also raise him and any one else who had this same faith so that one day all those who lived by that faith would be found alive in the presence of God. It was this faith of Paul that overwhelmed him so much that he had to speak about it to whoever who would listen. Paul quotes the One hundredth and sixteenth Psalm which says “Return O my soul, to your rest; for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you. For you O God, have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. I believed therefore I spoke.” This was why Paul spoke the gospel message because he believed his soul, his life was at rest for God had delivered his life from death. Wherever Paul walked he knew that he was always walking in the land of the living.

         This is why Paul never lost heart, never lost hope because he had an unwavering faith in God which sprung out of his love for God. Paul knew that this affliction he endured was preparing him for an eternal weight of glory  that is beyond all comparison. It was because of this that Paul did not get hung up on the things that are seen but instead Paul focused in on the unseen things, the spiritual things, the heavenly things. Do you see how this orientation of Paul kept him from loving his stuff and instead loving God with the stuff he had been given? Paul was a man who stored up his treasures in heaven. Paul knew that his earthly home might someday be destroyed but Paul also knew that God had prepared for him and all those who had placed their faith in God, a house not made with hands eternal in the heavens. God has always been preparing us us for this very thing, this great future that is in store for us. If God has been preparing our future why in the world don’t we believe that he is going to take care of our present? But how can we be certain that God really does have a future for us? Paul tells us that our hope is grounded by the presence of the Holy Spirit. God tells us that he is going to give us a foretaste of the future he has waiting for us by giving us himself as the God near to us, the Holy Spirit. This is what Paul writes about the Holy Spirit from the beginning of the fifth chapter of the book of Romans, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not put our hearts to shame because God’s love has has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” You see it can be hard to love God with all of our heart as he demands, to treasure God’s word in our hearts and to place our faith in that word and to know that it is God’s word which is our very source of life. And it can be hard to love God with all of our life, to be willing to give our life to God just as Jesus gave his life for us. And it can be hard to love God with all that he has given to us. But what keeps us keeping on loving God, is that God has given us the Holy Spirit who continually overwhelms us with God’s great love for us. When we experience every moment the flood of God’s great love washing over us how can we not respond with love in return, to love God with all of our heart, to love God with all of our life and to love God with all that he has given to us. It is this never ending flood of God’s love which reminds us very day that here we live in a tent, in a world that is not permanent, in a world that one day will be gone in a twinkling of an eye. This is why we do not focus on what can be seen, these momentary afflictions, but rather we find our hope focusing on the unseen, on that home in glory that God is preparing for us where one day we will enjoy life together for all eternity. Amen!