Join us as Pastor Tim begins a new series thinking about how God renews us, first by restoring how we understand Him.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Good evening, and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be here with you again for a brand new series. We’re beginning the series Renewed, and as we transition here, we’re in that pivot in January where we go from Christmas into this new year and we start to prepare for it. We’re going to be thinking about how we actually prepare ourselves to respond to what we just celebrated. How do we respond to God’s grace and His love in our lives?
As we do that, we’re going to turn to 2 Corinthians chapter 13. In it, we see instructions that Paul gives as parting wisdom, parting encouragement to the Corinthian church to help them think about the problems they face. I think that’s incredibly helpful for us because the things that the Corinthians struggled with are a lot of the same things we struggle with today. So let’s go ahead and come before our God in prayer, ask for His guidance to see how this applies in our lives, and then we’ll jump right in.
Let’s pray. Father, thank You for Your goodness and Your love. Thank You for being with us. Thank You for having patience with us. Lord, would You guide us even this night to see how You are renewing us, to see those areas that we are blind to in our own lives and in the lives of our churches. Lord, would You help us to be Christians who are more like You? Would You help us to be the church here in the United States and around the world in a way that is more in accordance with Your will? And in everything that we do as we do that, would You help us not to do it in our own strength, but by following You? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
I think we’ve all had that experience of taking a car to the auto shop. When we do, we know there’s this little noise, and we’re a little afraid that little noise is a big deal. So we keep putting off taking it. We keep thinking, I’ll wait a little longer. I don’t really hear it. Maybe it’s not really anything to worry about. And then we finally decide, no, it needs to go in, or we need to take it in for an oil change. And we say, would you look at that little noise? And we describe it to the mechanics as “sure.” Then you get the news: It’s not just one little thing. There’s a whole series of problems that have to be dealt with to make the car functional again. It’s not even safe to be driving it right now. And it’s going to cost an enormous amount of money to fix.
Now imagine if, for a moment, that mechanic didn’t come out and tell you all that and say, “I’m really sorry to tell you this. I know this is going to be some bad news,” but instead came to you and said, “Rejoice! You have some big stuff to work on in your car.” Now with a mechanic, you might think, I think he is rejoicing because he’s going to make a lot of money. But as we see in tonight’s passage, God calls us to rejoice as we see the list of problems in our lives for a very different reason.
So let’s go ahead and dig in right now and see what God’s Word tells us. Second Corinthians chapter 13:
“Finally, brothers, rejoice, aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss.”
Rejoice? That’s an odd word to have there, isn’t it? Some people have actually tried to argue that when Paul says rejoice at the beginning of this list of instructions—to be restored, to get along with people, all these challenging things he’s going to call the Corinthians and us to do over the coming weeks—that maybe we should translate it farewell instead, some kind of very nice parting greeting. That’s not a completely wrong approach to that word, but it seems like in the way that Paul uses it throughout the letter, the appropriate way to understand it is “rejoice.”
We’ve been thinking a lot over the last few weeks about rejoicing in general in life and certainly on Steadfast and Monday Nights. As we’ve thought about rejoicing—for example, Simeon and Anna rejoicing at the coming of the Messiah last week—they weren’t going to see the full fulfillment, but they were rejoicing and seeing what God was doing. They were seeing this gift that God had brought into the world in the form of the Christ child.
But how does that fit into rejoicing when God says, there’s some stuff you have to do—you need to be restored, you need to get along with people you don’t want to get along with, you have a massive bill of stuff that needs to be worked on? How do we rejoice in that context? It doesn’t feel like a context where we should be rejoicing, but Paul makes it clear as he writes the Corinthians about this that there’s one huge reason why they should rejoice, and that’s that Jesus has already done the work for them.
Yes, they were called to be transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit, but it’s critical that it was by the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul says they’re already in Christ. He addresses this throughout the letter, and he does so in this passage because he doesn’t call them “you heathens that have gotten so much wrong.” He’s listed a lot of horrible things, but he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say, “You people that haven’t really understood what Christianity is and maybe someday will be Christians.” No, how does he address them? Paul says brothers.
When he uses that term— that term that means the whole church, brothers and sisters we might say today—what he is talking about are people who he already considers part of the family of God, those who have been adopted by Jesus, those who have already experienced salvation. They’re messed up people, but they are believers. Believers like you and like me that have stuff to work on, but not on our own.
The mechanic isn’t handing us the bill. The mechanic is describing the problems and then saying he’s going to pay for the bill. Yes, there are things that need to be fixed, but we can rejoice because as we see that massive list, we rejoice that Jesus would actually care for us when there’s that massive list of things to do.
So as we go through these next few weeks and we think about that list that Paul provides, we see how it speaks to our own lives today. It’s important to start with that call to rejoice because we can rejoice that God is going to work with us through that entire process. God is the one that’s going to enable us to do the things we read about.
We sometimes, I think, feel like, “Well, if I can just get enough right, God will want to work the rest of the way with me. If I can fix most of the problems in the car, then I’ll be worthy to take the car into the mechanic.” But that, for most of us, doesn’t work very well when it comes to cars, and it works even worse when it comes to our lives.
We need the master mechanic. We need God Himself to be working on our lives and then rejoicing in the fact that He does even when we’re really messed up, even when the car of our life would never pass a safety inspection. There’s just this huge cloud of black smoke following us everywhere we go, and God takes us in and works on us because it doesn’t matter if we’re worthy. It matters that He cares for us, that He loves us, that He’s there for us. And that’s what we see here: that we’re rejoicing because of what God is doing.
Let’s look again at the end of verse 11. Notice how Paul ends that list of things they should do, and he says, “And the God of love and peace will be with you.”
There’s lots of stuff they need to do that they’re looking forward to in the future needing to do. These are things not distantly on the horizon. These are things they need to deal with right now, but the reason they can rejoice is because the God of love and peace will be with them as they do.
Sometimes people read that phrase and take it to mean, “If they do these things, God will be with them.” But Paul doesn’t phrase it that way. The way he phrases it implies that he sees the very fact that they can deal with these things as being because the God of love and peace is with them, and He’s calling them to be transformed in a way that makes them more like that God of love and peace.
The God who had called them into His family, and therefore they were worthy to be called brothers. He’s calling them to be what He is to them and rejoice all the way, because He is that already to them.
When we realize that, we start to have freedom to examine the things that Paul is calling us to examine in our lives. This call to be restored, as Paul puts it, isn’t just some kind of generic term. It’s a term for someone who needs to be repaired or something that needs to be repaired.
For example, and I think this is such an interesting picture, if you go back into the first gospel, Matthew, and look at chapter 4 where Jesus is calling His disciples, the gospel writer uses that same word, or rather the gospel writer does, as Jesus calls His disciples. Take a look at verses 20 and 21. It says, “Immediately they left their nets and followed Him. And going on from there, He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets. And He called them.”
That term that’s translated, “they’re mending their nets,” they’re sitting there as Jesus comes and they’re patching their fishing nets so they can go out and fish again. That’s the same term Paul’s using here. It could easily be translated, “mend your ways” or “be mended by God.” The same idea is they’re fixing what’s broken so that it can be useful again.
And so this picture of these fishermen mending their nets is more apropos than we might think at first because the very Christian life is modeled after fishing. Note what Jesus says to them. He says, “Come, be fishers of men with Me.” And so it’s perfect that they’re mending their nets.
And what does the Christian life look like? It looks like mending our nets so that we can go and be those fishermen. Because if you’re a fisherman normally and you go out and you have huge holes in your nets, you’re not going to catch any fish. Likewise, as we’re called to proclaim the kingdom of God and see more people in that kingdom, we’re not going to accomplish that or accomplish that well if we’re not mending the holes in the nets of our lives.
And that’s what Paul’s talking about here: mending those nets and having the freedom to do that because of that rejoicing we’re doing. We understand that God is with us, that the God of love and peace is there all the way as we’re doing it. And so we don’t have to pretend there aren’t any holes in our nets for fear that God won’t be with us. God is with us.
And so we can look at two different ways that Paul has been discussing with them that they needed to mend their nets, they needed to mend their lives, and we do as well.
The first one is that we need to mend from errors in our thinking. The Corinthians had been sucked in by so much of what the world was calling them to do. They felt the pressures of their culture and they wanted to be followers of Jesus, but they wanted to be followers of Jesus in a way that fit the world that they lived in, a way that maybe others around them could look at them and respect them and see them as important and strong rather than as those foolish people who decide to follow that weird little group of Jews that know about this alleged Messiah.
And so they started to try to figure out a way to shape Jesus to fit a mold that would impress people. Certain so-called apostles—not the real apostles, but false apostles—would come into town and they would talk about Jesus that sounded way more impressive to the culture, a superhero Jesus that was strong and mighty and did all kinds of things for His followers, but not one that would allow Himself to be crucified, not one that spent most of His time with the poor and the so-called unimportant.
And so they started to follow these other super apostles, as Paul refers to them. Take a look at chapter 11, verse 4:
“For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.”
These people come in and they start tweaking what the Holy Spirit does, they start tweaking what Jesus looks like, they start changing how the gospel works, and the people are okay with it because these super apostles fit their idea of what someone who’s rising up and important looks like.
They’re looking at the success of these people, and compared to Paul who’s always struggling and being persecuted and isn’t supposed to be particularly impressive in his appearance or his speech, these apostles sound so much more impressive, and their message sounds so much more acceptable.
And so they judge on the success of these men going around and attracting followers rather than on the accuracy of the gospel they’re preaching. They’re not so concerned with, “Is the Jesus being described to me by this person the Jesus of the Bible, or the Jesus that the true apostles have told us about?” Do we like what we’re hearing? Does it fit what we want to justify in ourselves? Do we like the one saying it? And so they get pulled further and further astray and Paul says they’re ready to go with it because it fits what they want.
And Paul doesn’t always. He cares about them, he’ll sacrifice himself for them, but that’s not what they’re looking for.
Take a look at what Paul talks about just a few verses before we began tonight in verse 9 where Paul rejoices in weakness. He says, “For we are glad when we are weak and you are strong. Your restoration is what we pray for.”
Paul says if we have to look like utter fools, and we have to look incredibly weak, even weaker than we are already, and we have to be looked down on by everyone, but we can ensure that you are actually strong in the way it matters, that you actually have faith in the true Jesus and His kingdom is expanding in your church, then that’s what matters.
And if it costs our dignity, it costs our lives, it’s worth it. And in that, he’s following Jesus, because what did Jesus do but to take on our sin when we didn’t deserve it and give His very life for us? How is it that we can hear that and we even know that’s true and yet we keep chasing after those who seem to go a different path?
We chase after successful celebrity figures and authors and commentators who build a cult of personality, who fit our political whims, who speak in terms of power for our groups that we see ourselves in, rather than those who model what it looks like to be like Jesus.
I think so often we do so because we think it’s going to maybe be just a little sacrifice. Yeah, this person isn’t quite like what Jesus would call a person to be like, and of course we’re all imperfect, but they’re flaunting it, they’re glorying it, that’s the reason they’re known, but that’s okay because we can give up a little there because that person is going to defend us, that person’s going to make us respectable, that person’s going to put us in a seat of power.
But see, when we do that, we start chipping away, and we chip away a little tiny bit here and a little tiny bit there of the truth, and we start to pull away just a little bit of the gospel here and say, “Yeah, the gospel is for those who realize that they’re so weak that they need God to rescue them, but we can take that out because then more people will know Jesus.”
And these people often are defending some parts of the truth. I saw a celebrity commentator recently talk about how we need to get away from the wimpy Christianity of today. We need to go back to the days when Christianity was strong and warrior-like and was willing to stand up. The Christians stood up for their own rights and fought for their rights.
And some people rightly responded to that, saying, “You’re talking about how people at different times have acted in the world, but you’re not really talking about going back to a pure form of Christianity. Christianity has never been about standing up for my own rights. It’s never been for triumphing over the world, in a worldly sense at least.”
It’s been about following the servant king who was willing to allow the world to actually put Him to death, to look down on Him, to view Him as accursed because He was willing to take on the curse of sin for us, that we might receive something so much better than the worldly power we seek.
Notice how we’re told in the Old Testament what the true king looks like. Zechariah 9:9:
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you, righteous and having salvation, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
That’s who Jesus is. Jesus isn’t some warrior that comes raging in and defends His own rights. He’s the king who gave up His rights for us. And yes, He will come again someday triumphantly. Yes, He is the mighty one. But what does He do when He calls us to follow Him? He calls us to follow His example of service, of looking out for others more than ourselves.
We need to ask the question, “Is that who I see Jesus to be? Do my values match Jesus’s, or do I match Jesus to my values?”
Because the Corinthians were matching Jesus to their values. They wanted to be respected in their own culture. They wanted to be in power in their own culture. They wanted to have ease in life. And so they were willing to chase after these celebrity pastors, these celebrity figures, just like we do today. Because those people promised what they wanted, and if it meant reshaping Jesus, it was okay.
But they were reshaping Jesus to their values, rather than allowing the Lord of the universe to shape their values to Him. And when we fall into those same traps—and all of us do that today—it’s part of being a sinful human being that we fall into these traps. What do we have? We have blind spots that then affect our actions, too.
Because if our picture of Jesus is not a Jesus who’s willing to sacrifice for those whom He loves, if our picture of Jesus is not the picture of Jesus that we find in Scripture, and if that Jesus that we find in Scripture is not constantly chipping away at the places our values are out of alignment with Him, then we can’t see how our actions are out of alignment with Him. We’re totally blind to it.
So we need to amend not only the errors in our thinking, we need to amend the errors in our doing, but the thinking allows us to change our doing. When we understand more of who Jesus is, when we’re coming to Him in Scripture and being shaped by what we find in Scripture, that’s when we can start to see, “Wait a second, my actions, they don’t look very Christ-like.” The way that we as Christians act often doesn’t look very Christ-like.
What are we called to do? It’s not to change our Jesus, but to change ourselves. We need to allow Scripture to filter our actions and transform them, to allow the Spirit to work in our lives. And when we do that without constantly wrestling with who Jesus really is, and we allow people to start to describe a different Jesus and we’re okay with it, then we’re going to miss that.
A few months ago, a knob broke in the kitchen, and I ordered some glue I thought would be really good to repair it. Then Christmas was coming, and decorations needed to be put up, and there was all kinds of stuff going on, and I completely misplaced the glue. I had this picture in my head of what the package of glue looked like, so I kept looking for it and couldn’t find it because I thought I knew what it looked like, but in fact, over time, I’d forgotten that the kind I originally went to get had been out of stock, and I’d ordered something else.
So I was looking for the wrong bottle, the wrong package, the wrong color package, the wrong shape package—the whole works. When we allow our understanding of the Gospel and who Jesus is to be shaped by the world, when we then try to actually act like Jesus, it’s like looking for the wrong package.
We’re looking at our lives, and everything looks okay because we think that we’re looking for the square bottle with the red label, and we’re really looking for the rounded bottle with the blue label. Because the world’s picture of what a successful leader of any type, or a successful person of any type is, and what Jesus’ picture of that is are so different.
As we make resolutions, as we go into this new year, if our resolutions are based on that false picture, we’re going to come up with a list of great things that aren’t the things we actually need to do. We need to allow Jesus to shape that, to shape that list, to shape our lives.
And as we do that, we come to an uncomfortable thing, an uncomfortable truth, which is, there’s a lot of stuff we’re wrong on. We’re wrong in the ways we act, we’re wrong in the ways we think. But remember what we said about rejoicing at the beginning? It’s okay to admit that we’re wrong. It’s okay to be wrong and be corrected by the Holy Spirit, because God is right, and that’s all that really matters.
Sometimes we’re in those moments, sort of like the early scenes in the opening video, where it’s snowy and cold and everything in our lives is just sort of frozen. But God’s going to keep working on us, and someday those little flowers are going to start sprouting to the ground. He’s going to bring out the beauty of what He intends for our lives. That’s why we can rejoice. We rejoice because we know that God is mending us. He simply calls us along for that journey to allow Him to keep tearing apart those areas where our lives are out of conformity, and allow Him to patch us up, and to experience what the true life of following Christ looks like.
So let’s pray as we go into this new year that we would allow the Spirit to do that in our lives, to see that there are areas where we’re wrong, but God is right. To see those areas where we’re looking for the wrong bottle. To see all those things, and as we do, to rejoice because the God of love and peace is with us as He mends us.
Let’s pray. Lord, thank You for Your patience with us. You came to this earth in the form of a servant, living, teaching, suffering, and dying for us, and defeating death for us, and You call us to follow You. So often it is that we start to follow some misguided picture of You instead.
Lord, would You help us to see those areas where we aren’t following You right now? Those areas in our thinking where we have allowed our own cultural values to shape scripture rather than the other way around. To shape who You are rather than the other way around.
And then, as You correct us in those things, would You help us also then to see those areas where that’s come out in our lives, in the way that we treat other people, and we’re not loving in the way that You’ve called us, we’re not patient in the way You’ve called us. We’re valuing ourselves more than others.
Would You help us in this new year to make the most important resolution, which is simply to follow You, and to do so with the confidence that You are with us? That it doesn’t matter if we have enough stuff corrected before we come before You, that You are with us, that You love us. For that, we rejoice, and we pray in Your precious name, Lord Jesus, amen.
So we rejoice, we rejoice in renewal, we rejoice in restoration, and we’re going to continue to think about that next week as we think about how God calls us to relate to others in the church and beyond. That’s where we’re going to be going over the next couple of weeks. That’s challenging stuff. It feels like that big bill from the mechanic. But our God is there to do the work for us, and to pay the bill for us. He just simply calls us to rejoice, and to see what He is doing in our lives.
So I hope you’ll join me again next week for that on Steadfast at 7 pm. And in the meantime, if this video was encouraging to you, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d give us a like, if you’d leave a comment, if you’d share this with others. You can help us to get the word out about the God of the Bible, the God who loves each and every person He’s made, and calls us all to turn towards Him.
Next week, we’ll pick back up and we’ll explore this some more. In the meantime, though, I want to mention you may have noticed we still have our Advent wreath and Christ candle lit, and the reason for that is because we’re still in the twelve days of Christmas. Those actually conclude this week, and so if you haven’t already, jump right in for the last few days of our adventure through the twelve days of Christmas. You can download the devotional booklet on our website.
Then on Wednesday at 7 pm, Faith Tree is going to be celebrating Epiphany, the traditional arrival of the wise men. That’s the culmination of the twelve days of Christmas. It will be a joyful way to wrap up that wonderful season we’ve been in, and to look forward to the wonderful things God is doing in the new year. So I hope you’ll make time, 7 pm on Wednesday, for that.
Of course, we would appreciate it if you’d like us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, follow us on YouTube. If there’s any way I can be praying for you this week, you can shoot me an email at the email address on screen; I’d love to hear from you, or leave a prayer request in the comments—we can all pray for each other. Likewise, if you have any comments or questions, email me or leave it in the comments. I’m always delighted to hear from you.
I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week, and I hope to see you on Wednesday night for the Faith Tree Epiphany service. Have a wonderful and blessed night.