His life and ministry focuses on Gods people and Christ-pt1
2 Cor: 1:15-20 · Randy Peterman · Feb 5, 2017
2 Corinthians (2017), No. 05
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/410261633315894

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Well, this morning I have done something kind of silly. I actually put a few PowerPoint slides together, which for me is remarkable because PowerPoint is not my friend. That being said, I use it at work all the time, but it's just not my favorite thing.

So we're going to take a look at 1 Corinthians 1, verses 15 through 20. When we take a look at this, it feels kind of like a personal part of what Paul is writing, where it's not just doctrine. You can tell that there's some kind of contention there between what happened with the church in Corinth, and Paul is responding to that. They're upset with him.

So as a preface to those things, I actually want to go over Paul's three missionary journeys briefly each. We won't go through each one of them at length because then we wouldn't go over the passage. Paul had three missionary journeys and the first one, and I don't have these in handouts because I don't have unlicensed maps to where I could hand those out and then not have to worry about legal issues since I have to deal with that on my conscience. You're just going to have to look at the screen.

His first missionary journey is relatively short in contrast to his second and third missionary journeys. But you can see he started in Antioch and went out across and just visited in Asia Minor and Cyprus and then came back to Antioch. One of the things about that first missionary journey is that he is this new ministry that he's been given, right? The Lord has trained him up, Barnabas is in his life, and he's on his first missionary journey, but he's He's kind of dipping his toes in the water, so to speak, on the missionary journeys compared to the next two that we'll see. If you want to do some studying about his first missionary journey, you'd start in Acts chapter 13, and that makes its way all the way to the end of Acts chapter 14. His second missionary journey, this one, that's a humdinger compared to his first one. You look at his first one, it was like it was just a little local trip around Colorado versus a trip around the nation, right?

So his road trips get longer and longer and so just for comparison here's the third one where he kind of changes the route a little bit but you can see he's covering pretty key areas along the coast in the Mediterranean there on the north side. So his first one he goes through or the second missionary journey he goes through Asia there and you can see that he's coming up He hits Troas, Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, and he comes down and here's Corinth. So on a second missionary journey he goes through Corinth and then he leaves from the port of Corinth and comes out, hits Ephesus, comes down, goes through Judea and Jerusalem and then comes back up to Antioch. And the reason why I bring that out is this part of the letter that we're responding to, we see that the church in Corinth seems to have gotten a bit whiny that he hasn't been through town more. And that to me is a little funny because it's not like it's just a walk across the street.

But on his third missionary journey, which is what we're, that's the context, he's already written some letters with them probably on his third missionary journey here, he said in the close of chapter 15, Let's see here, chapter 16, I'm sorry, close of 1 Corinthians, chapter 16, verse 5 through 7. He says, But I will come to you after I go through Macedonia, for I am going through Macedonia, and perhaps I will stay with you, or even spend the winter, so that you may send me on my way wherever I may go. For I do not wish to see you now just in passing, for I hope to remain with you for some time, if the Lord permits. So we have a few words in there I want to call out. We're not expositing all of 1 Corinthians 16, 5-7 here. But listen to his words.

But I will come to you, so I will come to you after I go through Macedonia, for I am going through Macedonia, and perhaps, perhaps I will stay with you, or even spend the winter, so that I may, so he's got these optional vocabulary words in in the way he's written this. So I want you to just keep the vocabulary of chapter 16 verses 5-7 in the forefront of your mind.

Because what he's describing, if we read this, what he's describing is that he was going to come in through Macedonia. visit Corinth and then go back into Macedonia and then come back out through Corinth. And that doesn't look shocking because he did it in the second missionary journey where he came and exited at the port of Corinth. And he wrote in his letter that he was planning at that point in time to winter there. So that is the context of what this snippet of the letter, 2 Corinthians 1, 15-20, is going to be addressing.

Any questions on that? That wasn't a thoroughly in-depth discussion of Paul's missionary journey there. His third missionary journey, if you want to follow along in Acts, if you just want to take a note of this, starts in Acts 18-23. and carries on to Acts 21-25. So you can take note of that if you'd like and read those. That was the context that these letters were written in.

And that is the end of that horrible PowerPoint presentation. So we have here this PowerPoint presentation, we survived that, but what do we have in the sense of our... Hold on, let me pull this thing up. I've failed in my document management. There it is.

When we're taking a look at 2 Corinthians 1.15-20, and we'll read that here together, you've got it on your handout, but hopefully your Bibles are open there as well.

He says, In this confidence I intended at first to come to you, so that you may twice receive a blessing. That is, to pass your way into Macedonia, and again from Macedonia to come to you, and by you to be helped on my journey to Judea. Therefore I was not vacillating when I intended to do this, was I? Or what I purpose? Do I purpose according to the flesh, so that with me there will be yes, yes, and no, no at the same time?

But as God is faithful, our word to you is not yes and no. For the Son of God, Christ Jesus, who was preached among you by us, by me and Silvanus and Timothy, was not yes and no, but it is yes in Him. For as many as are the promises of God, in Him they are yes. Therefore also through Him is our Amen to the glory of God through us."

So we see here that In 2 Corinthians, and we're going to find this happens in multiple places, there's this discourse where Paul is defending his actions and explaining who he is. And we saw some of that in 1 Corinthians. There were places where you could tell he was defending his ministry.

When he was talking about the apostles, for example. I'm of Apollos, and I'm of Paul, and I'm of Cephas. They were arguing about the church was arguing about who is greater and he's saying, guys, that's not why we're here. And he's defending his ministry as an apostle at that point in time. So here in this part of the letter we're seeing he's again defending his ministry and defending the actions he took because the church in Corinth was frankly pretty carnal.

And they were pretty selfish. So what we see here is that Paul had made a proposal of his plan. We read it. We saw how he used optional vocabulary that said, this is not a commitment. It doesn't say, I am coming this date to this date. Mark it on your calendars. He just says, I'm coming when I get there.

And this is what I'm hoping I get to do. And just for context, because I think it's valuable, if you'll turn with me to James chapter 4, verses 13 through 16. And I've heard this quoted and taught throughout my life. And the older I get, the more relevant it becomes. Isn't that how most doctrine is? The older you get, the more you go, oh yeah, that was a thing. So James chapter 4 verses 13 through 16.

Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit. Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Indeed, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that. But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil."

So we can make a plan, but we don't know what tomorrow holds. When we read chapter 11 in 2 Corinthians, we're going to see Paul lists out in pretty good detail all the suffering he did and I can guarantee that he planned knowing that there would be some suffering but we don't have any indication in the scriptures that the Holy Spirit revealed to him all the things he would suffer ahead of time but after the fact he was recounting it So it's quite a thing. And then he gets to go to jail later on and go to Rome. So the story's not even over yet by the time he's written chapter 11. So we can make plans like Paul did, but we rest in knowing that God has our steps numbered and directed. So the first section there, I've titled it Confident Tentative Plans. So Paul communicated with his intention with the church in Corinth so that they would expect him to come to Corinth twice on his third missionary journey. This would have given him a reason to spend more time with him in the winter. And that was his purpose. He wanted to spend time with him. Now why isn't he traveling in the winter time?

Tom? Storm front stuck over the Mediterranean. That's right. It's a lot riskier to travel when there are when you're in the stormy season. And so Paul is like, hey, I can spend more time with you and minister to you and equip you and prepare you and love you with Timothy and Silvanus. And he can spend that time with them. That's his plan. That's what he's planning on.

But Paul in his defense of his actions, because in verses 8 and 9 he's defending himself, and then in chapter 2 we'll see there's even more defense. He's explaining his intent But he says that his intent wasn't what God intended. So we're going to look at this and take a look at it in light of his needing to abide. If you're walking by the Holy Spirit and God says, don't do something, sometimes you don't do that thing that you told other people that you were planning on doing.

Paul is going to have to remind them of those things. As believers, we ourselves sometimes make plans and the Lord changes those things and after the fact we discover there was value in it. Sometimes God changes plans and there's suffering also. But a question we need to ask ourselves, and I would ask you, what plans are you grateful for God changing?

There's lots of things in my life that if I could somehow negotiate with God, I'd have said, listen, I'll trade you this one for this one. One of the highlights in my life was getting to fly in an acrobatic airplane. It was really, really amazing. It was three-dimensional movement in ways I'd never experienced before. But I would trade that a thousand times over for not having had three miscarriages. That would be good. I'd trade those. That'd be an equal trade. Even just one of them would be like, okay.

But I can see God's use in them. And I can see that he took the high and the excitement of the airplane to teach me about math and physics in the universe that he's created. And he said, I'm going to teach you about trials and suffering so that you can come alongside other believers. And I don't get to tell him he doesn't get to use that. So what plans are you grateful for God changing? I didn't plan on going in an airplane. But he took me on that and I certainly didn't plan on us having miscarriages. But he's used those. And if you ever sit down next to a pilot and you tell them you've been in an acrobatic airplane, get ready for an earful because it's going to be a long conversation. But it may be a good opportunity to share the gospel, right?

So Paul had planned to go to Macedonia, he journeyed to Macedonia, he went into Greece, and I want to point something out real quick on this map here. These maps are a little shy and they clip off here, but this is Macedonia and Greece includes Macedonia in it, but it is over here where he's moving over into Berea, that's what he's talking about when he says he goes in Greece in axe. But it was one of those things for me, I had to look it up, I was like, wait a minute, these look like they overlap pretty heavily, what's going on? And so one overlaps the other and that's, I'm sure if you were alive in the culture in the time, you'd have been like, oh yeah, Paul's going to Greece.

It'd be kind of like if you say Washington, if you say I'm going to Washington, what's the next question people ask you? D.C. or the state. Which one are you going to? So if you say you're going to Macedonia, that's a subset of Greece, but if you say you're going to Greece, you're going to where? Oh man, I use PowerPoint twice in one lesson. This is off to a bad start.

So Paul had in confident tentative plans. This is what I want to do. His excitement for the ministry opportunity was there. but the church had clearly taken offense. He says, I wanted to come to you so that I could bless you twice, that you'd have two blessings. The funny thing is that when I hear two blessings, it reminds me of some of my teenage years when I was getting charismatic and they'd always talk about the second blessing. which was this idea that the Holy Spirit would come on you a second time.

This is not that, and Paul is not talking about it just in case anybody got any wild hair ideas. I'm just going to call that out. That's not what he's saying. If he had been able to circle back around, that would have been a second opportunity for him to spend time with them.

It would have been a second blessing for them. Now I want to call out a negative to the second blessing here in the sense that in the Corinthian culture they were proud. They were arrogant and they liked to be able to brag about their special access and their apostles and their people that had been through which is partially why he had the problem with talking about being of Cephas and of Apollos and Paul in the earlier letter. And so had Paul gone through a second time, there would be a subset of the folks in the church probably that would have been braggadocious, that's a good $5 word, about Paul coming through town. And they would have probably been desiring in the flesh to be able to use Paul's name for leverage socially and draw that out on occasion.

But rather than being self-centered, Paul is pushing them to realize God's sovereignty in directing Paul. God is sovereign. God said I needed to go this way. I don't get to go back through Macedonia. As we saw on the map, Paul had already been through Corinth once, and now he's gone through there a second time, about the time of this writing. He'd already been through there, which is, there's a good chance that You've seen Paul twice. If we look at the different churches that he went past on his missionary journeys, some of the churches didn't get to see him at all. But the Corinthians, they were jealous-spoken, right?

So, unfortunately that took place. Let me ask this important question. Has the Lord ever sent important people in your life once? There's actually been quite a few people the Lord has sent into my life once. They came in. I met them. They were valuable and invaluable in my life. They taught me important things. They were able to share testimony. This gentleman here in the front is Don. I know him from growing up in Carson City. He lives there. He's been in my life in and out. The Lord has brought him many times. He's here for a missionary conference.

Lots of times the Lord has brought missionaries through once. and they're able to share their testimony and they share this is what God's doing and they take joy, not pride in Americans. They take joy in watching the Lord use what's going on. And so sometimes when the Lord sends somebody into your life, it's a one-time opportunity. Or maybe you're blessed, Paul comes through twice. And he'll bring people into your life.

And the amazing thing in all of that is that if we look at it and we don't count the blessing of their arrival, That's a carnal mindset. That's the flesh. Do we ever get angry at the Lord for not bringing those people back into our lives? Sometimes we do, just like the Corinthians.

I think if we're honest, that has happened on occasion. We had a son here from Uganda for six weeks. I think for him it was like six years because he was missing his family by the time he left. But he was here in town and it was just once. And I treasured that time that I got with him. It was really fun.

He'd never had Texas barbecue before so I was able to introduce him to that. He didn't even know that animals had cuts of meat. So he'd go to the butcher and he'd say, I want some kilograms of this and you'd get it. And then I'd show him that you could get brisket and he was disappointed because he didn't know that when he was younger. That's the spiritual truth. I thought it was Texas brisket.

But he came and he shared what the Lord was doing in his life and the ministry opportunities that were there. And of course, my dad's gotten to go and visit him. So I think all of us have been slightly jealous of that. Maybe the church needs to have like rotating, who gets to go visit a psalm trips, right? But sometimes we get frustrated with the Lord, and maybe angry would be too strong of a word for the mature believers, but sometimes we get frustrated with the Lord that He has brought somebody just once. But if we see those things in light of God's sovereignty and His provision, we can rejoice that we got the once.

So in verse 17, He says, Therefore I was not vacillating when I intended to do this, was I? Vacillating is a really good word. Any translator who chooses the word vacillating in there, and multiple translations have it, that's a good $5 word. You can get kudos points from your translator buddies for using vacillate. Who has the King James? Anybody? Go ahead and read out loud if you don't mind. Verse 17.

When I therefore was thus minded, did I use lightness, or things that I purposed or things that I purpose, do I purpose according to the flesh, that with me there should be yea yea and nay nay. Alright, thank you. So the use likeness is actually a really good literal translation of the Greek words that are underlining there. The idea being, did I come in, was I pulling your leg, was I just passively saying, I would do this. Vacillating is a fantastic word, but I don't think it's one we use often enough to feel like the translation is super clear. is the word fickleness.

In Corinth there were a mixture of cultures. It's a port city, right? You've got people coming from all over the world, and you can bet that some of them were more devious than others. And you can bet that some of the folks in the church in Corinth have been burned by yes-no and no-yes people, right?

And so Paul is calling out to them, that's not our behavior, that's not who we are as believers, and he wasn't taking it lightly. And that's why I would say this is Paul's defense of his integrity. If you're saying yes and no is what you actually mean, or vice versa, there's no integrity there. And Paul is saying this is about integrity. And I was not being disingenuous.

The question I've got there is what are at least three reasons we can give for not being able to execute on our intentions? We've actually answered this question indirectly over the last part of the lesson, but what are at least three reasons? Things come up. Okay, things come up. Sometimes the Lord just has something else for us to do. Okay, there's two. So things come up and sometimes our plans don't get to be executed. Could be a health problem. Could be a health problem, that's good.

Or we make a plan and the Lord says something else. And then the third one, and this is the one that I hope that you guys don't find too common in your life, and that is that somebody just bluntly lied. Lying can be a reason. It's just not a good one.

It's interesting, some people want to be very gracious and they'll say, come over to my house anytime. But you know they really don't mean that. They're trying to show they're generous and that's wonderful. And that may not exactly fit that, but there's a case where being honest, being straightforward, that people can trust your yes and no. If you say, come over anytime, he really doesn't mean that, because I know he has a family and all kinds of stuff.

So Paul, what we learn from this is that our yes is to be yes and our no is to be no. That's a virtue that God strongly encourages. Not to be vacillating. Yeah, not to be vacillating or take things lightly or not pulling people's legs. But the thing with the three reasons is one of them, and that's Paul's emphasis here, is that the Holy Spirit directed him in a different direction. And so by abiding, the outcome of that was not what he had proposed as a potential outcome.

But then he says in verse 18, and I love verse 18, it's my favorite of the ones we're going over here, he says, not yes and no. So let's talk about the faithfulness of God. What is God faithful in? Everything. He's faithful to his promises. When we think about God being faithful, we kind of take that for granted, don't we? It's a core tenet, it's an attribute of who God is. God is faithful. So we go, God is faithful. But the reality of God's faithfulness is that prophecies in the Old and New Testament require God's faithfulness.

If God says in Genesis that the seat of the woman is going to crush the serpent's head, He's got to be faithful to that. He's got to be able to orchestrate events in a way that that can happen. So God sovereignly takes care of these things and he carries them through and he carries them forward.

What about Abraham? What do we know? Why does it matter that God is faithful to Abraham? An example to us? Okay, it certainly is an example to us. But in Genesis 22, God tells Abraham, go sacrifice Isaac. And what has God already promised Abraham? His seed would be through Isaac. His seed would be through Isaac. His whole genealogy would be through Isaac. So Abraham is like, okay, God is faithful. This is the other part of that. Isaac was not like a four year old. Isaac is carrying the wood. that he's going to be stacked on top of. So Isaac could have put up a fight, but what does that tell us about what Abraham had taught Isaac?

God is faithful. Well then we also learn in Hebrews, we learn even more that that Abraham believed that, well, I have my sacrifice and God's going to have to raise him up. There's no other way this is going to work. And that's what Jesus talks about the resurrection and he talks about the patriarchs, because the Sadducees don't believe in the resurrection, but he says that God is going to give Abraham the land, still, because God is faithful. And as much as the Sadducees could doubt human works, they knew it was impossible to doubt God.

Because God is faithful. Still made them mad, right? Jesus was good at making them mad by teaching them true theology, true doctrine. The gospel requires a faithful God. If we are going to put our faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ, God has to faithfully follow through with the consequence of those things.

And so the question here is, do we consider God's faithfulness when we think about the chronology of the scriptures? And I think often we don't. It's kind of a given. And so my encouragement to you is that as you go through the Old and the New Testament and you see how things are laid out and what God has revealed, consider the faithfulness of God. God is faithful. We go, yep, right on, I believe that. But then it carries on and it's deeper.

And when we start to consider that and meditate on the scriptures and God's faithfulness together with those, it makes them more rich. So the second half of 18, he says, but our word to you is not yes and no. So he repeats himself the consistency of God is faithful and we are faithful too. In verse 19 he says, For the Son of God, Christ Jesus, who was preached among you by us, by me and Silvanus and Timothy, was not yes and no, but is yes in him.

And so what we see is that Paul connects this integrity, this yes and no integrity to the gospel. What veracity does Paul's ministry have? How true and reliable is the gospel if Paul is basically a con man? So he brings it down directly to the gospel and he comes to them and asks them to consider the consequence to his ministry if he comes up short and he is saying Yes and no. And he comes in like a con man. Paul and Timothy and Silvanus had a great amount of humility. What was the reward of being an apostle and being a sent out one to go and preach the gospel out in these places? What was Paul's reward? He was infamous more than he was famous, right?

When we get to chapter 11 and we articulate and we read through all the places where Paul was tortured and beaten and shipwrecked, that's intense. I get upset when I stub my toe. Or Legos on the carpet, that's the worst, right? Paul would have added that to chapter 11. He made us walk on a bed of Legos.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to be sacrilegious with that. So we see here that the yes and the humility and all that was there, if the gospel comes mixed with deception, it's no gospel at all. It's not the gospel if it comes mixed with deception. So what things about the gospel come to light when we think of it as a yes? Because he says it's a yes in him. What comes to light? Do we think of the gospel, do we think of our faith in Christ as a yes? And I'll be honest, before preparing this lesson, I can't say that there's been a lot of times when I thought of the gospel, or my response to the gospel, as a yes. But he says it's a yes in him.

Verse 20, and we're making pretty good time, I realize we're probably going to end up a little early here, but verse 20, amen? the glory of God through us. So in verse 20 he writes, for as many as are the promises of God in him there, yes, therefore also through him is our amen to the glory of God through us. So what are the promises of God? We talked a little bit about Abraham. What are some of the other promises of God? So we get our salvation believing in him, that's our promise. Okay, we get our salvation. He's with us always? He's with us always. You know, we enumerate all the riches of God's grace. His children, we've been born again.

There's just a whole list of things that every believer who's put his faith and trust in Christ has as a possession and those are all promises because we can't see a lot of those, most of those. The position and possession of the believer. Tom you rose your hand and then Gary did.

All of our cares. All of our cares we can cast them on him. There's a tenet that we have to worry which he says he cares for everything. And we looked at that in verses 3 and 4 and so if we just go earlier in that chapter, he said, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. The promise of comfort that comes there.

And Paul starts off with that. But the promises of God, we have the 34 things, right? And so the second question is, how many promises are there for believers? Well, so here's the difficulty in answering that question, is that we at Holly Hills have done the lessons on the 34 things that are true to the believer in Christ, but Arnold Fruchtenbaum and others, so the 34 things came from Chafer, let's pray Chafer, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum and other theologians actually has a list that's 215 with spaces for you to write in more that you read. Now some of his 215 are repetitive, kinds of like, well, Paul writes this, and Peter writes this, and John writes this, and there's heavy overlap.

But the truth of the matter is that promises for the believer are long, and one of the promises for the believer, and that's one of my favorite ones, is in Ephesians, where in Ephesians chapter 2, we see, let me turn there, Ephesians 2.7, so that in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Jesus Christ. So on into eternity, forever, as much as our time-space continuum minds can understand forever, forever he's going to show us the riches of grace in Christ. When I was a little boy, and I was in Sunday school, they were like, we're going to live in heaven forever. And I thought, that sounds boring. I'm being honest. I don't believe that now. Because I look at this, and I go, oh, God is going to be showing us the riches of His grace. And His grace is blessing, right? Not just covering for sins, as some have defined it. But the riches of His grace, His blessing, forever.

That's a promise. That's one I cannot wait. Heaven stopped being boring when I understood that. It's very exciting. It's very cool to think about for eternity God is going to show us his character. He's going to show us his love for us and we're going to, and I don't mean this to sound too existential, but we're going to experience that and it's going to be exciting. it's going to cause us to have a response of praise and worship and reverence and that's a promise that makes me go it's probably not going to be boring and it's not going to just be like you know you have the same toys and you get to play with them every day and mac and cheese and hot dogs like I was imagining when I was little. It's richer than that.

And so Paul says in the latter half of 20 there therefore also through him is our amen to the glory of God through us. So how many of you, when you hear amen, know it's time to open your eyes? Right? They said amen, it's time to open your eyes. Or somebody will say, hey, you know, I'm praying, you know, Maranatha, come Lord. And somebody will say, amen. Right? And you got, you got those, but we hear amen.

And we kind of just like God is faithful to go. Yeah. cool and then we know that's our social cue that we can do the next thing. So when we look at what Paul says here, what is the context of this writing? The context of this writing is that these people are upset because Paul in their assertion didn't do what he said he would do. But Paul is saying we did what God said to do. And so Paul wants to be the Amen.

Well, Amen means, kind of a rough English translation is, so be it. May that be done. So we want to be the so be it, may that be done of God. So if God says, go through Macedonia and back around through Asia, we're going through Macedonia and Asia and we're Amen-ing the whole way. But what does the Amen lead to? What does he say that the Amen leads to? He says the Amen leads to the glory of God. God is glorified. The radiant essence of God's being, God's glory, is magnified.

It's proclaimed. It's declared across all the places that Paul got to travel. Whether it's Macedonia or Asia or later to Rome. So these things come and they build out. Paul wants to be the Amen. He wants to be the so be it. And we just went over a few verses earlier the depth of suffering in 8-11 where that suffering was so deep that they couldn't see a way out. But he still wants to be the Amen. He still wants to be bringing glory to the Lord in those things. So I've got a conclusion section here which feels maybe extravagant because normally I don't have PowerPoint and I don't have a conclusion section, so we're just breaking new ground today.

When we bury our heads in the sand of the day-to-day distractions and we don't consider God's plans and His faithfulness, we find ourselves wrestling with the tensions of carnality. Said another way, because that's kind of wordy, I apologize for that. Said another way, if we find ourselves upset about the plans, that might be a cue for us to prayerfully turn to the Lord and say, okay, Lord, why did you change the plans?

Because my day during the work week is buried in Microsoft Office. When I show my team my calendar and they see all the meetings on it, they're like, how do you get anything done? I say, I don't, I just go to meetings. And I joke with them because I do actually get some stuff done, just never as fast as I want. But the thing is, if you're buried in the day-to-day, you look at the plans, you don't consider everything that's there. If James, inspired by the Holy Spirit, is true in James chapter 4, we don't know what tomorrow holds.

On Monday this week, a Muslim guy walked up to an RTD security guard and shot him in the neck and killed him right down the street from where I work. I bet you he had plans for later that day. I bet you his family did too. But he didn't know. We don't know what tomorrow holds. That's okay. For me, that's exciting, because I'm kind of an adrenaline junkie. But for my wife, who's a planner, that's the worst possible outcome. She doesn't know what's going to happen tomorrow, right?

But when we look at the day-to-day things in light of God's faithfulness and His sovereignty, as we're abiding, it puts it in an eternal perspective. We see those things in line of who God is. We can see He changed the steps of our feet. What if He changed our plans?

And I asked earlier, what are some of the things you're thankful that He changed the plans? When I meet new folks and we have a meal together or something like that, usually a good percentage of our population is either dating somebody or married and I usually find if I ask a married couple tell me how you met. There's always a good story. I know, Lindy, I heard your story when you met Hal. It sounded like some plans changed in a few places. The plans changed and we're grateful for it. The first time I met my wife, Neither one of us liked one another at all, and thought we were kind of obnoxious. But we were teenagers, so we probably really were obnoxious. For the record, Ali, not all teenagers are obnoxious. But I was.

But when we look at things in light of Romans 8.28, that God uses all things, we can see that the plans change, and we're okay with that.

We know that he changed the plans that we had for our betterment, for the building up of the body. The outcome of that, of course, is that we're conformed to the image of his son. That's the real change that we want. Who cares if the plans changed, because we're being changed, we're being conformed to the image of his son. So when we share our intentions, like Paul did in his earlier letter, what should we do in light of God's sovereignty.

Gary? Faith, rest. Rest in who he is. Rest in what he's promised. Rest in his faithfulness. And maybe make your plans for Saturday a little more tentative. That's okay. Any other thoughts or questions on this? Because next week we're going to get into some really awesome doctrine, but we had to get through this before we got to it.

And Roger has just now told me that he's probably going to teach 2 Corinthians 3.18. And we have to get through all of this until we get to 318. It's like a home run. Paul could have stopped 2 Corinthians at 318. He would have been like, we're done here. But we've got to get through them to get there.

So in 21-24 next week, we'll talk about how we're established in Christ, and who we are in Christ. And I think that's a pretty exciting thing. Because Paul says the gospel is the yes gospel. So we're going to hear some of those yeses. Thank you so much for sending your son to die on the cross on behalf of us, that we would be identified with him in his death, burial, resurrection, ascension and seeding. We do pray that as we go throughout our week that we would look at the plans that we have and we would see them as tentative and we would submit ourselves to you and your guidance and direction and look with excitement to what you're doing. We thank you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.