So You Want to Be a Pastor
2 Corinthians 6:2-10 · Unknown · May 29, 2022
Letters to the Corinthians, No. 109
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926192791201

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

We're working out of first Corinthians chapter 6 and I'm going to read from verse 1 on down to verse 10. I better get the right verses up here before I start. And working together, I'm reading out of the New American Standard, and working together with them, we also urge you not to receive the grace of God in vain.

For he says, quote, at the acceptable time I listened to you, and on the day of salvation I helped you. Behold, now is the acceptable time. Behold, now is the day of salvation. Giving no cause for offense in anything so that the ministry will not be discredited. But in everything, commending ourselves as servants of God, in much endurance and affliction, in hardships, in distresses, in beatings and imprisonments, in tumults and labors, in sleeplessness and hunger, in purity, in knowledge, in patience, in kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in genuine love. In the word of truth, in the power of God, by the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and the left, by glory and dishonor, by evil report and good report, regarded as deceivers and yet true, as unknown, yet well known, as dying, yet behold, my thing just jumped on me, yet well known, as dying, yet behold, we live, As punished, yet not put to death. As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. I don't know why it jumps around. I got Blue Letter Bible because Bob said I ought to have it. as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich, as having nothing yet possessing all things."

I really want Jim to come back to church so he can read the verses. So I'm going to start in verse 4. What we're talking about here is We're talking about chapter 6 focuses primarily upon Paul himself as a servant of God and what it means to be a servant of God.

What really makes a minister a very great man, according to J.B. Stoney, is his smallness. I love the term. So he begins with much patience and endurance and ends with having nothing. It is all characteristic. When once you get hold of the idea, the grand vein of this epistle, the trend running through the whole thing is the smallness of the Apostle Paul. If it even comes to a ministry, the whole point is smallness. God himself rolls in death upon the servant in some form or another. So smallness is what is the focus of what he's doing.

And it looks like, you know, Paul spends a lot of time in his epistles talking about trials and suffering. And so in this one. So in verse four, where we're going to start, verse four says, But in everything, commending ourselves as servants of God in much endurance, in affliction and hardship and distress. So the focus is on everything.

And he's commending or demonstrating, this word commending means to demonstrate the servants of God, what goes on with them. What can you demonstrably look at? If you look at 1 Corinthians 3, verse 5, Paul says, and what then is Apollos? And what is Paul? They're servants. through whom we believed even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one. Paul and Apollos are servants.

2 Timothy 2.24 says, the Lord's bondservant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged. 2 Corinthians 11, which we'll get to a few months from now probably, Are they servants of Christ?

The question is asked. I speak as if insane. I more so for far more labors, far more imprisonments, beaten times without number, often in danger of death. Five times I received the Jews' thirty-nine lashes. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked. A night and a day I've spent in the deep. So notice the idea here is endurance. And endurance, hupomone, abiding under the following in the service of the gospel. I think that in all of these verses, the number one issue of true ministry is endurance. And what does endurance mean?

It means the ability to carry a big load. It's kind of a simple way of putting it, a load carrying ability. So what do you look for in a pastor? Can he carry the load in the long haul? That's really what you look for. And he can do it with a lot of patience. I've got this new printer and it printed my notes backwards. Don't you love that?

So 2 Corinthians 12 tells us, the signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all Perseverance by signs and wonders in afflictions. I want you to notice something that when Paul lays out in chapter 12 that the signs of a true apostle were preceded, we're talking about spiritual signs, by perseverance. And then the signs and wonders came. Perseverance is the most important part.

And when he talks about afflictions, all afflictions means that he's kind of in a narrow place. He's in trouble all the time. Or hardships, these are necessities, whether they be external or internal. Or distresses, anguish, anguish. And it's one of those things that we all experience that, but I think a servant experiences it more.

Back in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, Paul said that we were afflicted in every way, but we're not crushed. We might be perplexed, but we're not despairing. We're persecuted, but we're not forsaken. We're struck down, but we're not destroyed. And here we always carry about in the body the dying of Jesus. purpose, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our body.

So, he goes through in verse 5, he starts to delineate these things, and these next three are things that are done from the outside, in beatings. We already quoted those three, those verses. In imprisonment, Acts 16.23, when they had struck him with many blows, They threw them into prison, commanding the jailer to guard them securely. In tumults or in riots, we've learned, studying 2 Corinthians and 1 Corinthians, that wherever Paul went, there was a riot. Because there were those that were for him and those that were absolutely against him.

Acts 19.23 says about that time, There occurred no small disturbance concerning the way. The way is the Christian life. No small disturbance.

And so then, in labors, this is things that were self-imposed. Paul worked, in our vernacular, he worked really hard all the time. He was working really, really hard. And then in sleepness or watchings, it's interesting, in those days, just like they do in the military today, when I was in the service, we always had somebody on guard night and day.

And at night they called it fire watch. You would stay up for two or three hours and your whole job, you had a flashlight and you walked around looking for fires. And if there was one, it was your job to wake everybody up and get them out of the building. Well, you can imagine traveling with Paul in the environment that he lived in. Somebody had to stay awake, and they probably did it maybe every couple hours. They'd go to sleep and the next guy would get up.

You have to stand watch, keeping your eye out for danger. And the other thing about this is I'm sure that the Apostle Paul had sleepless nights, praying for his disciples and praying for those that he was caring for. And he was hungry. Involuntary abstinence. Perhaps voluntary is included in this, but trying circumstances.

You don't just, if on Wednesday night we're doing the Gospel of John and we just did the woman at the well, the Lord Jesus shows up at the well, and he meets this woman, and where were the other disciples? They went to town to buy food. I'm sure it wasn't a drive-thru. So they were hungry a lot because people weren't waiting to give them food.

1 Corinthians 4.11 tells us, to this present hour, we are both hungry and thirsty and poorly clothed and are roughly treated and we're homeless. Homeless. Roger and I have decided that we're going to put an ad in Christian Magazine saying, we are looking for a pastor and here's what the job entails. So far we haven't gotten any responses. Usually the way that goes, we promise a salary and if you needed a place to live, we'll take care of you. Not this servant. We couldn't sell this to anybody. So how was Paul able to deal with all of this? He, with all these afflictions and all of these assaults on his life and how it was going to go.

He says in verse six, impurity and knowledge and patience and kindness in the Holy Spirit and genuine love. And I want you to notice we've seen this word in a lot in verse four, verse five, now in verse six. And this word in is a primary preposition. It denotes fixed position in place or in time. or in state. Paul's not talking here about, oh, this happens once in a while. This was what he was dealing with all the time, all the time. So I lost my notes again. Hang on. Well, I bought this new printer. It doesn't seem to know that page three comes after page two. The purity of life that he talks about is purity from defilement, not contaminated from Vine's dictionary. And knowledge simply means just general knowledge.

2 Corinthians 11.6 says, but even if I am unskilled in speech, yet I am not so in knowledge.

In fact, in every way we have made this evident to you in all things. Is this knowledge that he's talking about he's a really worldly savvy guy? Or is he talking about spiritual knowledge? Talking about what we know as positional truth and what he's conveying to people he's very well knowledgeable about it.

I think he's talking about spiritual truth. and in patience. It means that he's got a slow fuse. He's usually rendered long-suffering that he can endure, carry the load. And then he says, in kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in genuine love. Kindness just means he's gracious. He's a gracious man. His kind of person. He's that kind of a person.

And then in the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2 verse 4 says, And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power. Anybody who would desire to teach God's Word, the Spirit has to be the one that demonstrates that the Word is true and is powerful. And then he says, in genuine, unfeigned love. Romans 12, 9 tells us that love, which is agape, needs to be without hypocrisy, can't be phony. It says, abhor what is evil and cling to what is good.

So here he is with all of this going on in his life. And so you have to ask the question, does he have weapons? Does he have the ability to deal with these hardships? And what are they? In slide seven, he says they are the word of truth and the power of God. by the weapons of righteousness on the right hand and the left hand.

The word of truth is the power of God. Now, keep in mind, we're still dealing with this preposition in, so it's permanent. To be in the power of God and the word of truth. If we know anything in our sphere as believers, we begin to recognize how powerful the Word of God is. We're so apt sometimes to express the meaning of a verse in our own words rather than just let the verse do the talking. The words themselves are powerful, just the words. The words express a thought but not mere name of an object, for instance, relating to the gospel.

2 Corinthians 2.17, for we are not like many peddling the word of God.

You remember when we talked about that? But as from sincerity, but as from God, we speak in Christ in the sight of God. So Paul recognizes that everything he has to say is something that is said in the sight of God in Christ. And he does it on the basis of truth. 2 Corinthians 4, 2 tells us, but we have renounced the things hidden because of shame and not walking in craftiness or adulterating the Word of God. You're going to get the true thing. But by the manifestation of truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. The thing about God's Word is that it has an effect to affect your mind, to affect your conscience, that what you're listening to and what you're reading or hearing is true.

It's true. And it doesn't matter if you have an opinion about it, but it is true. So, he also, in the power of God, and this word power is dunamis, which means really explosive power, The verse is, so that your faith would not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. I talked about this this morning.

At Sunday school, with our society and the world kind of drifting off into Armageddon, lots of people are writing lots of books about, you have to really pay attention to this stuff that's going on in the world and in the news. so that you can be prepared for whatever it's going to be, but they don't mention God's Word. The only preparation we as believers have is what does God's Word say about what's going on? And so we've spent time, I think, in the last six, eight months in 2 Timothy and even in Revelation, what does God's Word say about what's happening? It makes a huge difference, because there are a lot of enlightened people that can recognize that things are sort of sliding, but they don't understand from God's Word what's really going on.

What are the factors underneath what's visible? So when he talks about from the power of God. God's word is powerful, and he has weapons, and he calls them the weapons of righteousness. And the word weapons really mean is really the word armor of righteousness, the weapons of the Christian warfare.

Second Corinthians 4.10 says, for the weapons of warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful by the destruction of fortresses.

We're not talking about physical fortresses here. We're talking about spiritual forces. We're talking about principalities and powers in high places. If we don't realize that what's going on in our world today is orchestrated by principalities and powers in high places, then we're going to be real surprised when it starts to show up.

Romans 13, 12 says, the night's almost gone. and the day is near. Therefore, let us lay aside the deeds of darkness." Now watch this last part. "...and put on the armor of light." The armor of light. Light is powerful. It exposes everything for what it really is. It shows us what's really happening. So, light as opposed to darkness, has a really powerful effect on everything we see and everything that we do.

Now, the weapons with which we meet, weapons of righteousness from the right hand and the left. It's interesting here. The right hand usually means offensive. You fight with the sword in the right hand and you hold the shield in your left hand. Defensive, offensive. Your right hand's a quarterback, your left hand is a linebacker. That's the way it works. So you can go either on offense or defense, but both of them are really powerful.

Chester McAuley said there's a well-known superstition in the Roman Empire, i.e. the right side is the side for fortune and prosperity, and the left side is for misfortune. If Paul has this in mind, he means believers should be prepared for both. So you ought to have a sword and a shield, both.

Next, we have a series of contrasts now made a little more puzzling in appearance, but still true. Watch how this goes. By glory and dishonor, by evil report and good report. William Kelly says that who among mankind ever touched the extremes of both as he who thus portrays the path of service according to God? Question mark. Whoever served the Lord Jesus so superior to circumstances? Question mark.

Who less elated? Who farther from depression? In other words, he's talking about the Apostle Paul. He had every extreme possible in his life every day. So he says the word dishonor, glory and honor and praise, the word for glory is doxa, and it just means praise or worship. The word for dishonor is just disgrace.

If you look at 1 Corinthians 4.10, we're fools for Christ's sake, but we are prudent in Christ. We are weak, but we're strong. We are distinguished, but we are without honor.

Contrast, contrast, contrast. defamation, evil report. In other words, the verse says glory, dishonor, evil report, good report, regardless as deceivers yet true. If you are The word for dishonor is a word people just defamate your character. They even report about you. A good report is, I'm not going to attempt to say the word, but it's praise.

In 1 Corinthians 4.13, when we were slandered, we try to conciliate. We have become a scum of the world. the dregs of all things, even until now." So Paul's reality check is pretty severe right here in terms of who, not only he knows himself to be, but also what his environment is and what he's involved with.

Verse 8 says, "...by glory and dishonor, by evil report, good report, regardless of deceivers and true." When we talk about deceivers and yet true. A deceiver is someone who is a seducer, tries to persuade you to go his way. But someone who's true is genuine, they're ideal.

In 1 Thessalonians he says, for our exhortation does not come from error or impurity or by way of deceit. But just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, So we speak, not as pleasing men, but God who examines our hearts. Don't you ever notice it's interesting how Paul always knows that God is paying attention to what he's doing. And he's always looking to the Lord for the right thing to say at the right time and endurance. He's in it for the long haul. It was true, it was never true, It was never true of Paul.

Never can it be with a thoroughly devoted and unworldly servant of God that anyone will speak well of Him. I know we really try hard that we want everybody to speak well of us. But if you become a true servant of God and you start speaking the truth, you're going to have enemies. And they're not going to be...

What did I read the other day? That with the Apostle Paul and the Lord Jesus, they either love Him or they hate them. Nobody just says, nah. You don't take Jesus, nah, and you don't take Paul, nah. You either love them or you hate them because of their message and because of the kind of people that they are. So did the Jews in the Old Testament to the false prophets. They hated them. They weren't true. Now, a quote from William Kelly, I think is really appropriate. Kelly says, referring to the Apostle Paul, revered as divine, as a divine being at one point and afterwards stoned, now suspected of murder and immediately after regarded as a god.

He experienced variations only less wild and rapid among the saints themselves, and among none more remarkable than at Corinth or in Galatia, where he had to vindicate even his apostleship among his own children in the faith, ready enough to bow down to arrogance and pretension. So he says, as unknown and yet well known, Unknown can mean either he was ignorant or he wasn't well-known. I think it means it could mean both actually. Or yet well-known, known thoroughly. Unknown yet well-known.

Paul lived two complete extremes in terms of popularity. They either loved him or they hated him. In Galatians 1, the Jews in the beginning, they loved Paul. Look at how he was glorified by the Pharisees and by the Sanhedrin until he began to preach Christ. And then what happened? They wanted to kill him. They disowned him. And then it says, to be dead, dying, and yet, behold, we live. And this is just, the word means just death or die, and yet to live is zawu, which just means to live.

Second Corinthians 4.11 says, we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.

Chastening. The New American Standard called it punishment, but it really isn't. He's talking about chastening, which is child training. We're being afflicted by evils and calamities. We are at the same time put to death or try to put us to death or kill us physically.

But the Lord, as we talked about in Sunday school, do you think that any of these trials and tribulations that Paul had just sort of showed up in his life because people didn't like them? The point I'm making is that were they not ordained of the Lord? Yeah, they were. Every single one of them. And for all of these purposes, all of them, you can't say that the Lord has put a trial in my life for one single purpose. It's always more than one. And it's probably more than just you. Because the sphere of influence we live in, people pay attention. And they watch how we deal with suffering and chastening. and how we deal with it.

My father-in-law said to me one time, after we'd gone through a year where we didn't make very much money, and then we started to make a lot of money in the real estate business, you can do that. He said to me, he had a lot of wisdom, my father-in-law. He said, well, Doyle, you did pretty good when you didn't have anything. Let's see how you do when you have something.

People are watching. So verse 15, as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, as poor, yet making many rich, as having nothing, and yet possessing all things. So sorrowful just means grieving, heaviness, sorrowful. And rejoicing is being glad, being excited.

Colossians 1.24 says, Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of his body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ's affections.

So how is this possible? How is it possible that he can be a beggar at one point and make many others rich at the same time. A true servant of Christ isn't immune to disappointment. He's not immune to any of this. His goal as a beggar is to make you rich. And the only thing that motivates him is his faith and his hope. He knows.

First Corinthians 1.5 says that in everything, you were enriched. You were enriched in him in all speech and in all knowledge. Having nothing and no one, but also possessing all things.

Romans 8.32 tells us, he who did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how will he not also with him freely give us all things? All things.

1 Corinthians 3.21 says, so then let no one boast in men, for all things belong to you.

When Ephesians says that we've been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, a man said one time, if you can find one blessing, spiritual blessing, that you don't have, then the whole thing's a lie. We are blessed. Problem is we don't know. We're ignorant about those blessings or we know about them and we really don't believe them because we try to equate them with worldly blessings. These are spiritual blessings in heavenly places.

So all these hardships coming from accusations that were directed against Paul, God is able to make all grace abound towards you that you always, having all sufficiency, may abound in every good work." So in chapter six, Paul focuses upon himself as one of the servants of God. What really makes a minister a very good man, as I said before, is smallness. So he begins with much patience and much endurance, and he ends with having nothing. but at the same time possessing all things.

From the Hungry Heart series, suffering takes us in conditions where truth has us in position. We will never learn any truth in experience excepting in the deepening knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the lack of this which is the cause of weakness amongst believers. Bare doctrine is not personal fellowship with Him. I must say that again. Bare doctrine is not personal fellowship with Him. We have that which is lovely and full of blessing in Him, but if we are to know it as such, to prove its truth, to enjoy it always, it must be in taking these things in connection with Him. John Darby. And he closes as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, as poor, yet making many rich, as having nothing, yet possessing all things. So let's close.

Dear Father, how we thank you. We recognize that as ministers and as representatives and as ambassadors for you here, that we can't expect to have an easy time of it. And that's okay, because it is producing in us a far heavier weight of glory in Your dear Son, the Lord Jesus. And we thank You. We pray in Your Son's precious name, Amen.