In 2 Corinthians 2, Paul is unsettled over Titus and the church at Corinth even while ministry is going well. When plans, health, work, or politics don’t go how we expected, we too find ourselves shaken. But, no matter how uncertain we feel, there is a source of certainty we can turn to: our God.
Unfaithfulness rarely begins with one grand rejection of God; it grows through small compromises that seem harmless because life is still going well. In Judges 1, Israel receives clear direction and real success, then starts choosing what feels easier, safer, and more efficient. How far can those little shortcuts carry God’s people from him?
We’ve all felt the temptation, after someone has been called out for sin, to just leave them there and be done with it. But in 2 Corinthians 2, Paul tells the Corinthians this punishment is enough—now they need to forgive and comfort the one they punished.
A few taps can broadcast someone else’s failure before you’ve felt any of their pain. In 2 Corinthians 2, Paul describes correcting a troubled church through affliction, anguish, and many tears—insisting the words came from abundant love, not a desire to wound. His example presses a searching question: what is actually happening in your heart when someone else must be corrected?
An acre of dirt, trees, and rock is being lifted over a California freeway on seventy-five girders—the largest wildlife bridge on earth, twenty years in the making, priced near a hundred million dollars. We tend to go for the grand, but the Apostle James suggests that being grand isn’t what matters most.
This Week at Little Hills returns as Pastor Tim takes us to the book of Jude and thinks about what it means to live as those with hope.
If we have a chance to be superior, we want to take it. Yet, Paul points us to another way even when he had the authority and had been wronged by the people he was interacting with. It’s telling as we think about how we live and interact with others.
Decades later, an aged Apostle John still cannot finish a sentence about Jesus without being overwhelmed with excitement. The Gospel has not become ordinary for him, but has it for us?
The baby of the next century, a famous inventor promised, would be rocked in a steel cradle, the family dining at a steel table in a house of steel. Even the most famous visionaries come up short. So where do we find security when our ideas seem misguided or downright bankrupt?
What if zeal aimed at God can still be working against Him? The future Apostle Paul had plenty of zeal as he persecuted the church, but he would soon learn that isn’t enough.