Rested Development

 September 6 2020

2 Corinthians 10:1-6, 12:7-10, 13:5-9

         Well, the day has finally arrived when the last of our children, Matt and Sarah are moving out of our house and starting a new life in their own home. It is a strange feeling this being at long last empty nesters yet this is what we had hoped for all along. I remember reading one time that parenthood is an eighteen year journey of letting go and how true that is. The whole point of teaching them and disciplining them and spending time with them is so that they can become an adult who can go out and be independent. We’re proud that all three of our children are gainfully employed, that they know how to save up their money and have made wise choices and at long last they can invest what they have earned in a home of their own. This is what you hope for when you bring that tiny baby home and you wonder just how in the world you are going to care for this child so that one day this child can take care of itself. You want them to grow up, to be somewhat mature because lets face it, even I am still working on the being mature thing. Most of all what you want is for them to be able to carry on with out you because you realize that one day this is probably what they are going to have to do.

         Just like our hope is that our children grow up and become mature adults, God’s hope isn’t much different. God too hopes that his children grow and mature the only difference is that to be mature children of God doesn’t mean that we will become independent but so they will be fully dependent on him. In most of Paul’s letter’s he almost always reminds his readers that growing up is what God expects. Now this maturity that God expects of his children has to do a lot with how we as God’s children react to the suffering that comes from hearing God’s word and obeying that word by loving others. As we learned last week, the world hated Jesus because the works that he did witnessed to the fact that the works that the world does are evil. In other words with the coming of Jesus, there came a new way of ordering life, one where extravagant love, justice and selflessness were to be the norm. The old way of life lived by the flesh and its desires is on the way out and those who still want to live that way are not happy about it. So, when we follow Jesus and live like Jesus then we can expect, like Jesus, that the world is going to hate us. This is why we said we need encouragement. We need the encouragement of God which comes to us through the work of the Holy Spirit and we need the encouragement of our brothers and sisters in Christ so that we do not lose heart, we do not lose our faith.

         What we are striving for as we experience suffering on account of our faith in Jesus is what Paul calls patient endurance. This is the right response when we are living in by and through the power of the Holy Spirit. We have to fight the two responses of the flesh, the first of which is to take flight. As Jesus taught his disciples, those who receive the word with joy, if they do not put their roots deep in his life will want to take flight when persecution or suffering comes on account of the word. The other reaction of the flesh is to fight, to fight against those who persecute us. This is something Jesus clearly taught against. In the eighteenth chapter of John, Jesus responds to Pilate when asked about being the king of the Jews said” My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting…” As citizens of a new and different kingdom we do not fight but rather we take up our cross and follow Jesus. This is what it means to patiently endure our suffering. The Greek wording for patience that Paul often uses means to abide under and this is what we are called to do to, to live under this suffering until God calls us home.  This understanding of patience as abiding or dwelling under helps us understand the hope of our Christian maturity. Just as it is a sign that our kids are mature that they have their own place to live so also with God his desire that we abide or dwell in a place this is a sign of our maturity. We learn of this in the fourth chapter of the book of Hebrews where we read, “Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.” And further on in the chapter, we read, “For if Joshua had had given them rest, God would have not spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for God’s people for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did form his.” The reference to Joshua alludes to the people of Israel entering into the Promised Land. God’s hope for his people though was not just that they would live in the promised land but that they would come to enter his rest.  Sadly, they never did receive the greater promise of God’s rest which life in the Promised Land was supposed to be about. This was the root cause of their being sent into exile and when they did return from exile to once again live in the land promised to them by God the people of Israel still failed to receive the rest that God promised they could experience. The promised land then was a symbol of the greater promise of God, that his people should enter his rest.

         All of this is what we have to understand in order to make sense of just what Paul is speaking of when he writes about being at war and taking down strongholds. These are both images taken from the conquest of the promised land by the people of Israel. Just like the promised land was one where the people of Israel had to fight to lie there so too is the rest that God promises is something that must be fought for. Yet just as in the case of the promised land, the war is fought in and through the power of God; it is a more a war of faith than action.This was powerfully demonstrated in the battle for Jericho, a stronghold city. How was this battle won? This battle was won by trusting in God’s direction to march around the city one time for six days and on the seventh day march around the city seven times. Then the priests were to blow the trumpets, the people were to shout and the walls of Jericho would a come tumbling down. It goes without saying that these directions given to the people of Israel by God required them to trust him.It is the falling of the walls of this great city through faith in God that I believe Paul is calling us to remember when he writes that the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh  but have divine power to destroy strongholds. Now, it seems a little confusing that we just heard Jesus say that his servants were not going to fight because his kingdom was not of this world yet here Paul is seemingly talking about doing just that. But what we have to remember is that the war that Paul is referencing is a war within ourselves not a war outside of us. Paul writes that we are to destroy every argument and any lofty option raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ…” The key to understanding what Paul is saying here is I believe found in what he means by the phrase the knowledge of God. We have to ask ourselves just what does it mean to know God? The gospel of John proves very helpful in figuring out just what it means to know God. It is there in the seventeenth chapter, that we have recorded the prayer of Jesus on the night he was betrayed. In that prayer Jesus states that “this is eternal life, that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” So, first this conveys the importance of knowing God that in doing so is our eternal life. Secondly, when we understand just what is meant by eternal life is then we can also know what it means to know God. Eternal life it just makes sense is the life of God who is eternal. And Jesus describes this eternal life again in this prayer stating, “You Heavenly Father have loved me before the foundation of the world.” So, eternal life is a life of love; the Father loving the son, the Son loving the Father both loving the Holy Spirit and both being loved by the Holy Spirit. This tells us that knowing God has something to do with loving others. This is confirmed by what we find in the twenty second chapter of Jeremiah where God, speaking about king Josiah says, “Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is not this to know me? declares the Lord”. This is a further confirmation of what is found earlier in Jeremiah in the ninth chapter where God says, “let him who boasts, boast in this that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.” So, from all of this we can begin to understand that what Paul is talking about when he speaks about the knowledge of God is not just some head knowledge that we know attributes about God but rather that in knowing God we know that we must be people of steadfast love, justice and righteousness just as God is a God of these as well. What Paul is writing about then is how will we fight against whatever keeps us from fulfilling this moral mandate we have to love others with justice and righteousness. You see as Christians we know that we have been set free from sin; no longer are we held captive unable to to do the right we know to do. So, no matter who God might place in our path we are to respond with steadfast love, justice and righteousness; anything else is to come against the knowledge of God.It is right here that the promised rest of God enters the picture. When we do the good that we know that we ought to do our hearts are at peace, at rest and this peace is extended outward to the ones we show our love to. But when we fail to love or refuse to love the person in need this when we find ourselves in a state of unrest, not peace but at war within ourselves because we know we could have done something but didn’t and what we need is a good reason why. This is why Paul tells us that what we need to war against to have peace within ourselves is our thoughts, these reasons we think up that justify why we have failed to offer steadfast love, justice and righteousness when we so easily could have done just that. Paul uses three different words to describe the various workings of our mind that need to be destroyed. The first he speaks of is the Greek word logismos which means what is found to be reasonable, to weigh out the pros and cons to determine what is reasonable. This Paul adamantly writes, we are to destroy. This just makes sense doesn’t it because to be a person who loves with a steadfast love, who does justice and righteous the same way God does means that that we know doing so is not going to be the reasonable thing to do. How do we know this? We know how how unreasonable this life of steadfast love, justice and righteousness can be because of the cross. The cross was the most unreasonable decision ever made, that the one who knew no sin would take on our sin so that we who were held captive in sin might become the righteousness of God. There just is no way that the cross can be understood by reason. As the famous theologian Blaise Pascal so beautifully put it, “Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.” So, as Paul demands, reasoning, this weighing out the pros and cons whether we should act or not should be destroyed so that the heart is free to act as it knows it should.

         The second action of the mind that Paul writes about is our lofty opinion.  The Greek word here is hyposoma and the idea behind it is a towering of self-conceit. Here Paul is addressing the fact that we want to justify our not loving someone on account of who that person is instead of acknowledging the fact that our loving anyone never depends on them but on us. It is the epitome of self-conceit to judge another person to be unworthy of being loved.This is what James addresses in his letter in the fourth chapter when he writes, “Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. The one who speaks against a brother or a sister or judges them, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge of the law. There is only one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?” The law James speaks of here is the law of love and as he said when we withhold love to another because we find them unworthy of doing so we not only judge them we also judge the law of love. This is why Paul says this high and mighty attitude must be pulled down and destroyed. 

 

         The third working of the mind that must be taken captive is the thoughts we have. The Greek word here is noema and the idea behind it is the mental effort to reach a conclusion. What Paul is addressing here is that people tend to overthink things especially when it comes to loving others so much so that all that gets done is that they think about doing something and not much else. What Paul tells us we should do is to take captive these thoughts we have of loving others. The word Paul uses here for captive is a word that means to be taken captive by the spear, to be a prisoner of war. This fits with how Paul frames his whole argument in this section of Second Corinthians as a waging of a war. Just as the Promised Land had to be conquered in order for the people of Israel to live in peace there so too in order for us to enter into the rest God promises us we must have a conquering mindset. What is at stake is whether we will experience this sense of rest that comes when we love as we know we should or are we going to be filled with unrest because we realize that we could have done something and we should have done something but we deliberately chose not to and the reason for our indecision lies squarely upon us.Paul is saying when you make decisions keep in mind the high stakes of those decisions. What you are doing is fighting for what God promises can be ours. Yet we must not forget that the weapons we fight against these actions of our mind are weapons that have divine power. This is why Paul tells his readers to examine themselves, to see whether or not they are in the faith. They were to test themselves and to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ was in them. Paul knew personally how he needed this power of Christ within him. He faced what he called thorns in his flesh, people who harassed him at every turn. And for Paul the challenge was the same as for everyone else, how to love even these. What Paul discovered is that he did not have it in him to love like he knew how to do but what he did have within him was Jesus. Jesus was the one who powerful enough to defeat the strongholds of his mind. Just as he wrote earlier in this letter, it is the love of Christ that now controlled him. Just as the walls of Jericho fell through faith in the power of God so too the strongholds of our mind can be pulled down and destroyed through faith in the power of God. This power is the power that can raise the dead, the power that can bring into existence those things which do not exist and it is by this power we can be more than conquerors to live in the promised rest of God. Paul’s prayer was that the people of Corinth would be mature, which meant that they would lead lives fully prepared to offer love, justice and righteousness to whosoever stood in need of it next. This should be our hope as well, that we would always be ready through the power of Christ within us to let no workings of our mind keep us from loving others as God has created us to do. To the honor and praise of God. Amen!