2 Corinthians 6

2 Corinthians chapter 6. We're going to read through the chapter, and then we'll pray and see what the Lord has for us here today. It starts this way:

Pray with me please. Heavenly Father, open our hearts to this chapter to what Paul is saying; but more importantly, what You are saying, Lord, because we believe that all Scripture is God-breathed. We believe that You moved upon the Apostle to write the things that he did, as well as the other biblical authors. Therefore, every time we come to the Word, we know that You have things that You want to say to us. So, we ask You to speak. We ask You, Lord God, to help us open our spiritual ears. We ask it in Jesus’ name, amen. You'll notice that Paul begins chapter 6 here by saying: “Working together with him (and that means Christ; he says) then, we appeal to you.” I want you to know that this is an interesting little tidbit, but the word, him, is not in the original Greek. In fact, the first 3 words working together with are all one single Greek word; him is left out, but it is put there by your English translators because it meets the context. And many times, when translators are putting it into English for you and I, they have to know what the context is so that they can fill in sometimes the missing words. The reason they put him in there, working together with him, and not necessarily working together with you, or working together with someone else, is because of what Paul had said in the last chapter as he was ending it. Let me put this on the screen for you. What you'll remember what Paul said is: 2 Corinthians 5:20a (ESV) …we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. It didn't really take a lot of time to talk about this last week, but he said: “we are ambassadors for Christ, (That means we are His ambassadors; we're working with Him, he says,) God making his appeal through us.” And that's why Paul starts this chapter—and of course, there weren't chapter divisions in his letter, but—that's why he begins this chapter by saying:

“Working together with him…we appeal to you.” With this single sentence, this single statement made by the Apostle Paul, he highlights one of the most amazing things about what it is to be a child of God, and that is the privilege that God gives you and I to actually work with Him. It's amazing. Sue and I, sometimes we'll be talking about this and we'll think: God, why in the world did you leave this work of the church to us? This work of sharing the Gospel, this work of loving people, this work of praying, and all the things that you've called the body of Christ to do and to be, why did you leave it to us? We are so weird most of the time. I mean, we're so fallible. We gravitate to drama and we get tripped up by so many things, and yet God allows us the privilege of working together with Him. And to think about that is just really awesome. I want you to notice that Paul never says that God works together with us, and that's because it isn't our work; it's His work, and He asks us to come along and do it with Him. That's a significant distinction that we make there related to that because there are many of us in the body of Christ who frankly spend a fair amount of our time trying to get God to help us fulfill our agenda or our will. You can tell it from our prayers; listen to us pray and you can hear that we're trying to get God to put His rubber stamp on our agenda rather than the voice of submission that says: Lord, what are you doing? We want to do what you're doing and so forth. That's the model that Jesus gave us. Check out this passage on the screen, John chapter 5, verse 19:

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. That is a curious statement from the standpoint of us understanding it. What Jesus isn't saying—He's not saying that it was impossible for Him to do anything apart from the Father. That's not what He was saying. In fact, when Satan came to tempt Jesus, that was the whole purpose behind all those temptations, was to get Jesus to act apart from the Father. That was the whole M.O. What Jesus is saying in that passage in John chapter 5 is that He was committed to doing only what the Father told Him to do or what He saw the Father doing.

To be completely honest with you, we read words like the ones we just put up on the screen that are spoken by Jesus and it's really hard for us to relate to the essence of what He's saying. That's because at the very core of our being, we have to confess that we're all pretty self-willed. I mean, if we're going to be honest; if we're not going to be honest, then you don't have to admit anything. But if we're going to be true to ourselves, we're going to realize that we're all pretty self-willed—and that means we're pretty focused on seeing my agenda, our agenda, getting accomplished. That's why we often give God a lot of advice in prayer. When we're talking to Him, we tell Him what we think He should do, and we'll be sometimes very specific about the things that we think He should do; and if He doesn't do it that way, we're a little miffed. So, when you and I read words like Paul begins this chapter with, saying, “working together with him,” it's a challenging phrase for us to absorb, let alone knowing what it looks like. But what it looks like is Jesus. That's what I love about looking at the life of Jesus. I think it's important that we be reading the Gospels, reading through the four Gospels almost continuously, because in those accounts, we see this model over and over again about what it means to work together with Him. What it looks like was shown so beautifully during the time of Jesus' ministry, and perhaps nowhere uttered more powerfully than when Jesus was praying in Gethsemane. Let me put this also up on the screen from Matthew. 26. You guys know this:

And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; (but he didn't just end there; we usually end there, but he ended with) nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” And what Jesus did for us there is He showed for us that working together with the Father chiefly means submitting to the will of the Father. It means submitting to His will over and above our own. See, we talk about submitting to the will of the Father, and we're all usually, yeah, sure, we need to submit to God's will, but then when we put it in the context of submitting to His will and denying ourselves our own, well, that's a different thing. We're not quite as comfortable with that idea.

So, what is the appeal that Paul is working together with God to make? Look again with me in verse 1; he says: “Working together with him, then we appeal to you, (and this is the appeal) not to receive the grace of God in vain.” I wanted to let that sink in for just a second because every one of us ought to stop at this particular point and ask ourselves the question: What does he mean by that? What does he mean by not receiving the grace of God in vain? The reason I want to look into that question is because it really tweaks people. I mean, thinking about this idea of receiving God's grace in vain really does challenge people. But the apostle Paul here is urging the believers in Corinth not to turn away from the Gospel. He's urging them not to turn away from Christ. And that whole idea— what I just expressed to you— has made some of you in this room and who are hearing me right now very uncomfortable because the idea of believers turning away from the Gospel just doesn't sit well with a lot of people. They struggle very much understanding how anybody who is genuinely born-again could possibly turn away from the Lord. As a result, many simply choose to believe that if someone appears to be turning away from the Lord, it's only because they had never really turned to Him in the first place. In other words, they believe that they were never born again in the first place, and that's why they turned away. And I dislike that conclusion. I dislike it because I don't believe it's biblical. Not just because there's a lot of things in the Bible I dislike but I believe them anyway because they're in the Word; but this is one that I dislike because I don't believe it is in the Word. And whenever I communicate that to somebody, one of the first questions they'll shoot back to me is: So, you believe that you can lose your salvation? That's not what I said. It's not what I said. What I said is that I personally do believe that it is possible for a born-again Christian to turn away and walk away from the Lord. I believe that's possible. In fact, when we come to that whole question of losing your salvation, don't ask me. Don't ask me if people can lose their salvation because I believe it's a question that we believers have foolishly attempted to answer. And I'll be honest with you, I don't like to enter into that kind of foolishness because it's—

Have you ever wondered why we have debated it for as long as we have? Gee, maybe the Lord didn't give us any specific word along those lines. All we know from the Word of God is that we are warned. We are warned to be careful about receiving the grace of God in vain—and that's just one warning. There are all kinds of warnings. Boy, go to the book of Hebrews and read the warnings that are given the body of Christ. That's all we need to—people are so bound up with the whole idea of the question: Can you lose your salvation? Or whatever— and they've gravitated to one side or the other, and now they no longer see the Word of God as what it's really trying to say. It's just— leave that alone and just take the warnings for what they are because if you make a conclusion that is wrong, you're not going to see those warnings for what they are. You're just going to say: Well, that's not for me, that warning isn't for me. I think that's dangerous. The apostle Paul considered threats to a believer's faith to be a dangerous thing. I see that throughout the course of his epistles. He considered it— he considered there to be landmines of danger all throughout the landscape, and he warned people about them. And he goes on here now to remind the Corinthians about the Gospel that he preached to them, as he says in verse 2: “For he says, “In a favorable time (and he's quoting now here from Isaiah chapter 49) I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.” Behold (Paul says), now is the favorable time… now is the day of salvation.” And by the way, this is Paul's way of clarifying what was contained in his Gospel message, and no doubt he was doing it here because he'd been criticized, as you know, by these Judaizers who'd made their way to Corinth; and they were attempting to bring confusion to the essence of what Paul had been preaching as it related to his Gospel. And so, he's now talking— bringing clarity to it. He says in verse 3: “We (don’t) put (any obstacles, he says) in (anybody’s) path, so that no fault may be found with our ministry…” I would imagine this statement is probably a direct response to the criticism that Paul had been receiving about his ministry. And then he goes on verse 4; look at this, he says: “but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way…”

Now I'll be honest with you. In the ESV I don't like the syntax of this verse. If the ESV is just the way I read it to you: “but as servants of God, we commend ourselves in every way.” I think the syntax should be turned around; it should be: but we commend ourselves as servants of God in every way. In other words, I believe what Paul is saying here is: I'm about to give you my résumé as a true servant of God because that's what was being challenged. These people were coming to Corinth, and they were challenging Paul's genuineness as a true servant of God but they were putting up all kinds of examples of what it meant to be a servant of God that Paul didn't really think were legitimate. He goes: What really legitimizes my calling or my servanthood? Have you ever thought about that? What— when you think about a pastor, for example, or whatever, what legitimizes his calling? Do you know what a lot of pastors think? The number of people who come to church, the size of their building, the amount of their weekly offering, or something like that. Unfortunately, a lot of pastors slip into that, which is really dangerous, of course. What legitimizes your ministry? We tend to look at that through the— we look at the glasses of the world and we look at certain markers that we think mean success. What means success in your ministry? Well, listen to Paul's résumé that legitimizes his servanthood in Christ: “by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, (this is his résumé, you guys) 5 beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; (but also by) 6 by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, (in other words, the work of) the… Spirit (of God in the life and heart of a believer, that) genuine love.” For people, right? Verse 7: truthful speech, and the power of God; (carrying as he says we do) with the weapons of righteousness (both in) the right … and (in) the left (hand); (and then he goes on to talk about) 8 through honor and dishonor (dishonor— did you get that? Part of his résumé was dishonor, being dishonored by people), through slander and praise.” Well, we look at a guy today, if he's been slandered, if somebody said something against him, we're like, well, I don't know, I think his ministry's over. You just say something nasty about somebody today— it doesn't have to be true — and you've smeared him, you've smeared his character, his reputation. Paul says slander is part of what legitimizes me as a servant of God. Boy, that's interesting thinking, isn't it?

What else here does he talk about? He says: “We are treated as impostors, … (yeah, we know that we) are true; (he says, we are treated) 9 as unknown, (people look at us like: Who are you?) and yet well known…” Remember that interesting story in the Book of Acts where these guys are— they'd been watching Paul cast out demons, and so they decided to use it as an incantation: In the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches, we adjure you to come out of him, or whatever, and the demon speaks through this guy and goes: Jesus I know, and Paul I've heard about, but who are you? It's like Paul was known; Paul was known in the spirit realm. Even though he was maybe unknown as far as some people were concerned, he knew that spiritually he was known. And that wasn't a pride issue. He says: “as dying, and behold, we live; (we always look like we're about ready to die, but yet we live on; he says) as punished, and yet not killed; 10 as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything.” Think about those words. That's Paul's résumé. It's what legitimizes him as a servant of God. How do you like those markers? If you took all those negative things and put them into bullet points on a résumé, you don't say: Well, let me see your résumé. What do you think qualifies you for the ministry? Well, here we go: sleeplessness, imprisonment, causing riots in just about every town I go into. You and I would look at that, and we'd say: What? And by the way, he's going to have a lot more to say about this in the coming chapters, but suffice it to say that Paul's résumé of what he believed legitimized himself as a servant of God is pretty much the opposite of the kinds of things Paul's detractors were most likely boasting about. Paul saw these things as actually proving his sincerity because who in the world would go through all those things and keep going, right? Who would keep doing it? Who would keep subjecting themselves to that kind of a life, and so forth. Yeah, because we can all look pretty spiritual when things are going okay, can't we? But boy, when things get hard, when people start slandering you, when people start doing the kinds of things Paul's describing here, when you're going hungry and you have many sleepless nights all put together, you come away thinking: What in the world am I doing? Why in the world am I doing it? And you know what? If there isn't a real, honest reason behind it, you're going to pitch it. Who in the world would subject themselves to being poor so that others might be made rich? That's just not the way our flesh works, right? So, Paul goes on in verse 11 to say: “We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide open. 12 You are not restricted by us,” And what he means by that is, we're not holding back our affections from you; we haven't restricted our affections as it relates to how we love and care for you. But then he goes on to say: “12 but you are restricted in your own affections,” In other words, you're holding back; you're holding back your affection from us. And that's when he says here in verse 13: “In return (I speak as to children) widen your hearts also.” We're asking you to open your hearts to us as we have opened our hearts to you. Paul is not calling them children or speaking to them as children in order to be condescending in any way. He's expressing the devotion of a father who loves his children but is not being loved by them in the same way that he is loving them. And then you'll notice in the last verses Paul calls the believers in Corinth to a pure and devoted walk with God, one that recognized the danger of connecting to a world with a very different agenda. Look what he says. Verse 14: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? (None.) Or what fellowship has light with darkness? (None. They have no relationship.) 15 What accord (or what agreement) has Christ with Belial? (Belial is a nickname, if you will, for Satan. What does Satan and Jesus have in common? He says) …what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? (Portion speaks of inheritance. What inheritance does a believer have with an unbeliever?) 16 What agreement has the temple of God with idols?” He's asking all these questions to make this point: “For we are the temple of the living God; as God said,

“I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”” In other words, God lives in you, in your heart, right? He says—here's the conclusion, verse 17: “Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, 18 and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.” By the way, those are two quotations that he's using in that section: one from Leviticus—it wasn't that long ago on Wednesday night we went through Leviticus and we talked about that—and one of them is, again, from Isaiah. But Paul is answering the question— you see, he had just asked the question— well, he didn't put it so much as a question; he put it as a statement; he said you've restricted your love for us; we've opened up our hearts, but you've restricted your heart to us now. He's basically answering the question here of why they restricted their love toward him; and the answer given in these verses is that they had allowed the influence of ungodly people and ungodly situations to so affect them in their hearts that they're being turned away from their love for the saints, and, Paul's greatest concern, of course, is their love for God. This seems to be kind of a problem with the Corinthians, this inability to walk in discernment about who I should be fellowshipping with. I see this in a lot of Christians, too. There's just this lack of discernment, and they'll hang with people that they shouldn't hang with from the standpoint of the influence that's coming, or they'll listen to things or watch things online, or whatever that they shouldn't be listening to or watching because the influence has a very negative impact on their lives, even though they may not be realizing it. Even in Paul's last letter, he challenged them; he warned them about influences. Let me put up on the screen for you; a comment he made in 1 Corinthians. Look what he told them. He said:

Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.” You see, even in the last letter, Paul was challenging them and saying: Your influences here—you got to be very careful about what's influencing your heart. I've always liked to look at your heart, my heart, like a big, huge garden that we can plant up with good stuff that's going to bear fruit, or we can just let it go to weeds, and plant all kinds of rotten stuff that is going to choke out everything else that's good. What's the conclusion? Paul says: Don't be unequally yoked. That's the conclusion. That's the exhortation. Don't be unequally yoked. And it's a word picture. It's a word picture that they would have gotten very readily; we don't. I don't know when the last time you yoked two animals together to pull a cart. It's been a long time for me, and I think they were little plastic ones. It's just not something we do in our culture today, but it's something they did all the time in that culture; and they understood the idea that hitching two animals together that are mismatched is an exercise in futility. Because when you have these two mismatched animals, they're not going to pull with the same kind of effort and energy; and what's going to happen is you're just going to end up going nowhere. Your cart or wagon or whatever you hitch to the animals is going to go nowhere because there's no ability for the animals to work together— because they're mismatched; they're unequally yoked. And as humorous as that might be to watch animals hitch together and go in a circle and go nowhere, it's not funny at all when it happens in human lives. In fact, it's devastating. This sort of an unequal pairing between a believer and an unbeliever is something that several of our people, or even here at Calvary Chapel, know very intimately; and they have great sorrow in their hearts over that sort of a scenario. Now, some people came to Christ after they got married and they came to Jesus and their spouse didn't. Other people, they were believers and maybe during a time of backsliding, they connected with someone—and I'm relating this to marriage because that's most often what it is related to, but it's not limited by any means to marriage. But sometimes people enter into marriage during a time of backsliding or whatever, but whatever, however it happens, it's painful. It's very painful. It's very hard to watch. I'll be completely honest with you. By the way, since I brought it up from the standpoint of marriage, if you are married to an unbeliever, and you're wondering what the Word says about how you should live, I want you to know, a couple of years ago, somebody actually sent me that very question, and I answered it on my blog—and it looks like this: That's the blog post: What should you do when you realize you're married to an unbeliever? And by the way, if you want to know how to get to my blog, if you go to our website, which is ccontario.com, and look at the very top, see those little colored icons at the very top? The one on the far right, if you click on that, that goes to my blog, and I've dedicated that blog mostly to doing Q&A type stuff related to God’s Word and the Scripture. That blog post will give you some insights from the Word, by the way, on being married to an unbeliever.

But I want you to understand something here: Paul is not telling you and I, when he says to be not to be unequally yoked, he's not suggesting that we not associate with unbelievers because we know that's impossible. Right? In fact, he actually says that in another letter: Don't misunderstand me, he says, when I tell you to withdraw from people who are slanderers and sexually immoral and dah, dah, dah. I'm not telling you to not relate to the people of the world. We expect that the people of the world are going to act like people of the world. So, what is he saying? He's basically describing the yoke, which is an intimate connection—and that's why we relate it most often to marriage, but it could be a yoke in business. He says that yoke is a yoke of connection where you're being influenced. That is what he's saying stay away from because it's going to come back to bite you big time, and it's going to cause heartache, and it could cause heartache for many years to come in your life— which raises the question for all of us: Who or what is influencing our hearts? In other words, what have we yoked ourselves to that may be influencing us? Because — I mean, ultimately, it's going to be the Word or the world. But we remember the exhortation that Paul gave when he wrote to the church in Rome. Let me put this on the screen. He said:

Do not be conformed to this world, (rather, he said) be transformed (let your mind be renewed. Let that work of renewal take place in your mind through the Scriptures). And then in verse 16, he ends this chapter by asking another question. Look in your Bible there. He says: “What agreement has the temple of God with idols?” This is a very penetrating question because that word, agreement, really just jumps out at us. Agreement. Because the longer we walk with the Lord, the more we realize that this world that we live in has very little in agreement with what God is doing in our hearts. And it's funny because when we're first walking with the Lord or casually walking with the Lord, we will do our best to try to incorporate the world into our walk with Christ, and we'll try to Christianize things. We like to do that, to try to sanctify them so that they're okay. But the longer we walk with Jesus, the more we see those things sour in our lives, we realize: wow, this world has nothing in agreement with the kingdom of God, and hopefully we become a little more discerning about those things, and we're able then to say: eh, thanks but no thanks. Because this is the exhortation that Paul is giving, and we need to have that attitude: I am not going to yoke myself to those things in the world that are of the world, that are unequal to the work that God is doing in my life, the purpose, the will of the Lord. God has a purpose. We say that it becomes trite to people. God has a purpose for your life. Well, guess what? It's true. But understand this: The world has a purpose for your life, too, and it's not in agreement with what God's purpose is. Satan has a purpose for your life, too, and it is the opposite of what God's purpose is for your life. So, Paul is saying: Do not be yoked with those purposes that run contrary to God's purpose for your life. Understand, be able to discern the purpose of these things in the world and stay away from them. Don't get hitched together with these things in such a way that you're going to be connected unequally because it's only going to drag you down; it's only going to diminish your walk with God; and it will create all kinds of other issues. That's not to say—I want to end here by— I want to be careful not to end on a low note related to people who are today married to an unbeliever. That's why I want to encourage you, if you are one of those, to read that blog post because I want to inject hope. There is hope. There's always hope in Christ when an individual comes to that realization that, wow, I am in this marriage relationship and we are completely mismatched as it relates to the Kingdom of God, the spiritual dynamics of the Word of God, and so on and so forth. It's just this mind-blowing kind of a revelation. But there, God is good. God is gracious, and God always brings hope even into situations that for you and I appear very hopeless. I want to encourage you along those lines. So, we're going to end there this morning.