We Do Not Lose Heart (Part 2 of 4)

Bob Lepine: Ever worried that somehow you're not good enough to serve God, that you are less than? Today we'll see why your sense of inadequacy isn't necessarily detrimental to your ministry. On Truth for Life weekend, Alistair Begg looks at the Apostle Paul's example in ministry and how he was able to persevere despite mounting afflictions and oppositions. Here's Alistair.
Alistair Begg: The picture that we're given of Paul is not one of somebody who's able to run roughshod over the concerns of others. It's not of somebody who is unaffected by the damaged relationships that have taken place within the Corinthian context as a result of misunderstandings. We don't have the sense of Paul being able on account of the peculiar gifts that he's been given because of the privileges in ministry that he's enjoyed, that he is somehow now by this stage of the game inured from these things. You know, it's other people can deal with that stuff. Other people can handle the burdens. You know, he's not saying, you know, I'm the one that writes the letters. I'm the one that speaks at the conferences. No, he says the fact of the matter is that together we felt so under the burden of it because he was engaged in it, because he cared about it. Do we listen? Do we actually get under the burden of the thing? Or have we become so used to the story? I mean, we know the story. We can complete the story after the first sentence. We've heard it all. Now he says we were actually burdened, utterly burdened, burdened beyond our strength. And he says we don't want you to be in the dark concerning this. We want you to know that this is what it actually meant for us. And whether this was physical or whether it was spiritual or whether it was a combination of the two, it doesn't really matter. They were at the end of their tether. And it produced in them what he's going to say later on at the very end of the letter, that which is most necessary in the service of God, namely the fact that they were forced again and again and again to trust God entirely. The gospel ministry, as we know, brothers, provides us with immense privileges and also with peculiar pressures. And those pressures and those privileges expose our frailty. They can either appear to our ego and so we are destroyed, or they make us feel so perilously hopeless that we feel we must make a run for the border as fast as possible. And Paul's point, as we come now to 2 Corinthians 4, is that God in the economy and wonder of his purposes has determined that it should be this way. So verse 7. He this ministry that we have, he says, is by the mercy of God. We are in a great spiritual battle. We know that God is sovereign over these things, and the fact is the treasure is in jars of clay. We carry this message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives, in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. I think that's probably J. B. Phillips. It sounds like him. But here's here's where we are, a conference for unadorned clay pots. Speakers, all of them remarkably unadorned in the purposes of God. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, he says, not many of you were, not many of you were. It's absolutely true, isn't it? It looks like craziness. What a strange group to put together. What an odd choice of individuals. That's what the people in Corinth were saying. Why can he be high sounding like some others? Why can he be impressive the way many of these other teachers are impressive? Why is he so apparently inept and weak? We have this treasure. Well, what is the treasure? You can decide whether it is the apostolic ministry of verse 1 or the gospel of verse 4 or the knowledge of the glory of God in verse 6. Or you can do what I do, and that is decide that it must be all three and take it that it is the ministry of the gospel of the glory of God. But it is in an old clay pot. It's a description of human weakness. Terracotta pots that were 10 a penny in the marketplace that were both fragile and expendable. Well, we know that, don't we? That we are fragile and we are expendable. Frail as summer's flower we flourish, blows the wind and it is gone. All men are like grass and the glory of man like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower falls, but the word of the Lord will stand forever. We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. The King James version, remember the King James version? Some of you please don't shout out now. The King James version, which is a good version King James liked it. And and we can check and we can check with Dawn, but I think there is some reason here to consider this and you can use it in a Q and A session for later. But the King James version translates this verse, but we have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God and not us. May be of God and not us. I wonder whether Paul is not simply saying that it is in this that the power of God is displayed, which is obvious, but that it is only in this, that it is only in this, I. E. in weakness and in humility that it is discovered, that it is known at all. so that pride and arrogance and self-assertiveness and an undue focus on our own abilities or our backgrounds or whatever else it is will deprive us of the very power that is necessary for persevering and completing the task. Think about it. The most dramatic displays of divine power when you read through the Bible are found in those who are prepared to acknowledge that they are nothing very special. Isn't that true? Moses, I'd like you to go up to Pharaoh. Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh? He doesn't say excellent choice. I'm glad you didn't think of my brother because, man, he talks all the time, but he's no good. No, you've got the fellow here. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'll get it out on Facebook. Let everybody know, Pharaoh, here I come. No, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh? Gideon, you mighty man of valor. Pardon? You talking to me? I am the least of a lousy family. You're my man. Now we could run through it. It's tedious, isn't it? But let's just take the principle. Isaiah 66:2 This is the one to whom I will look, says the Lord, he who is humble and contrite in spirit and who trembles at my word. In other words, the very things that is is one of the Puritans says it says that we in in shunning trials, we miss blessings. In seeking to disguise the reality of our own frailty, we fail to enter into the dimension of God's power that he uses to manifest his glory. That seems to me what Paul is saying. Pride and arrogance negate by definition divine power. Divine power. That's not for us to determine what is a display of divine power or not. On the day that will become apparent, we may get it completely wrong now, but in terms of our own approach to things, we now get an an inkling of why it is that by the time Paul is writing at the end of 2 Corinthians, he says, to keep me from becoming conceited, to keep me from becoming conceited. How jolly honest is that? To keep me from getting a fat head, he says. Oh, he's the Apostle Paul. He couldn't get a fat head. What? Are you talking? He he's the he's a champion of fat heads. Jars of my background, very good background, very good university, very good theology, and keeping the law remarkably strong on that. He knew that. That was his background. I'm your man. Until he realized it was according to the mercy of God. By the mercy of God I have this ministry, that his mercy was shown to me, like the the chief of sinners, he says. And even at this stage of the game, when in an experience of God's amazing power towards him that would have played very very well on, you know, like Christian television in Corinth, if there had been such a thing, he says, I'm going to talk about this in the third person. In fact, I'm not going to talk about it at all. I was caught up. I experienced this. But here's the real issue. I was given a thorn in the flesh so that I might discover that when I am weak, then I'm strong. Now let's just pause can we just for a minute and say are we going to actually embrace this? I ask myself, I'm we can speaking to myself too. Are we going to embrace this? Are we going to are we going to buy this? Are are we going to just keep going the way contemporary evangelicalism is going in North America? Looking for more superheroes and presenting ourselves as very accomplished and managing to do this and managing to do that and capable of this and doing that. Well, Paul has explained this to us in verses 8 and 9 in his apps. You didn't know he had apps, did you? But he has apps, and I'll just point them out to you. There's four of them, afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down. Those are his apps. A for afflicted. We are afflicted in every way or we're troubled on every side. We're perplexed. And remember he writes to the Galatians and he says, my dear children, I am perplexed about you. What he's saying is we don't always know what to do. We don't always know what to think. Verse 9 we're persecuted. He who had hunted down the Christians, chasing them down like an animal, now finds himself on the receiving end of the same treatment. Afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down. As in a wrestling bout or as in a boxing match, in the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade. And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down and cut him till he cried out in his anger and his pain. I am leaving. I am leaving. But the fighter still remains. Paul knows what it is to have been thrown down on the mat, and so do we, don't we? I remember in in Scotland years and years ago with a gentleman who's become legendary, at least in my mind now, a big man called Mr. Collins who scared me dreadfully as a young man in my early 20s. And I used to visit him in his home because I was supposed to. And and on one occasion in the afternoon he was chiding me for certain elements of my preaching and and he said and and he had a stick that he had beside him in his chair. Why he needed it when he was in his chair, I don't know. But it was threatening, and he had a stick with him in the chair and he said and and I'll tell you what, Sonny. He says, you better stick with that Bible. He says because if you start any nonsense in this church, I will stand up in the pew with my stick and I will shout heresy. I said, thank you, Mr. Collins. Thank you. And I remember getting in my car going and this guy's on my side. This is this he this fellow is trying to help me. And he was representative of quite a few. Now what does he say, of course? Well, what we observe is that the surpassing power of God is revealed not in preserving Paul from affliction, perplexity, persecution, and being struck down, but rather in those experiences. Look at what he says. We're afflicted, but we not crushed. We're perplexed, but we're not driven to despair. Close, as we saw at the beginning in chapter 1, but not despairing ultimately. We're persecuted, but we're not forsaken. We're not down, but we're actually never knocked out. We're not destroyed. Now what is this a testimony to? Is this a testimony to the ability of Paul to withstand trials? No, it is a testimony to the adequacy of God's grace. And look at what he says. This is a life and death issue. We're always carrying around in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. While we live, we're being given over to death for Jesus' sake so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. In a nutshell, Paul is declaring that it is in dying that life is discovered and displayed, which is of course in keeping with the teaching of Jesus. Jesus said, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. Suffering, writes James Denny, for the Christian is not an accident. It 's a divine appointment. And as Paul walks in the footsteps of Jesus here, he finds that in his very own physical frame he bears testimony to the fact that he has been included in Christ. Now we could go on from there, but we won't. So in Acts the narrative gives us something of the perseverance of Paul in summary. In the epistles, and we'll come back to this, we have it by his testimony, the words of his own mouth. Just one point by way of application, and it's already inherent in what I've said, and it is this, that it is our sense of insufficiency in these matters. It is our sense of insufficiency that will be a plus rather than a minus. It is in our awareness of the reality of these challenges. You see, we lay ourselves open to all kinds of dangers when we attempt to deny or to disguise our frailty. We lay ourselves open to all kinds of temptations. We should actually be more afraid of commendation than of criticism. Now I know some of you are sitting there going, why I'd like a just a little commendation um especially from my deacons. That would be nice just once before I finally make a run for the border. But no, in fairness I think you will prove that to be the case, that more spiritual progress is made in disappointment and in tears than in than is made in success and laughter. When people make more of us than is justified, they do not help themselves and they do not help us. They absolutely don't. My boss in the early days, Derek Prime, would always remind me of these two salutary truths. He said, remind yourself that if they knew of you as you know yourself, they would never make much of you. In fact, the opposite, which is true, isn't it? If people really knew us, they knew how tempted we are, how frail we are, how easy it is to be ensnared by all kinds of things. Some of the men in our church think that somehow or another, because we've been called into pastoral ministry, we we sort of move around the world as if we didn't see anything. We didn't see how attractive that girl was. We didn't see those magazines in the airport when we were passing through. No, we don't see those things, you know. No, we weren't tempted in that way. That's not true. That is not true. Yes, we were. And to the extent that I seek to deny or to disguise the reality of what it means to make our way through this world and create an illusion for people to make you commendatory, you harm yourself. You harm those people. It's only when we see things in the light of the eternal that we can rightly make sense of the temporal. And this was Derek again. He said, you know, we find ourselves aware of stars only when we cannot see the sun. We are preoccupied with men only when our minds are turned away from God. And one of the ways in which God chooses to bring that home to us is to remind us again of our frailty so that we might rest in his sufficiency. Can I can I end by just saying let's let's not run from this notion of of what we really are in terms of being old clay pots. Let's let's let's embrace let's embrace our ordinariness. And let me finish with a quote from George Eliot in Middlemarch. The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. And that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who live faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs. How many of us will even be a footnote in history? Even the history of our own families. But this should not depress us because it is in this very frailty and in this awareness of our own transient existence. Looking at the life of Paul before us, we might be enabled by God's spirit eventually to say I managed to finish the race. God helped me keep the faith. I fought the fight. Well, hopefully as we proceed through the next couple of days, as the word of God is opened up to us, that we might be encouraged because some of us were probably here at the point where we're saying I think I could maybe just get to Wednesday and then go home and retire, which is quite a thought since you're only 29 years old.
Bob Lepine: You're listening to Truth for Life weekend with Alistair Begg. He returns in just a moment to close today's program. Christians of all ages need to be encouraged by the truth of God's word. And if you're in your 50s or your 60s, or maybe you have a loved one or a friend who is, we've got a great book for you. It's titled Not Old, Not Young, Not Done, Following Jesus in your 50s and 60s. The author Christopher Ash offers practical biblical wisdom for navigating this unique season of life, and you'll learn why these years aren't intended as a time for winding down, but for continued growth and fruitful service to Christ. Find out more about the book Not Old, Not Young, Not Done when you visit our website at truthforlife.org. Now here again is Alistair.
Alistair Begg: Father, thank you that you make us really aware of the fact that the best of men are men at best, that on our best day we're actually unprofitable servants, that Paul does us a great service by being so amazingly transparent in revealing his heart. We were burdened beyond our ability to frankly cope with it even to the point that we despaired of life itself. However, knowing the grace of God, so we want to ask that right even in this moment that the spirit of God will come and meet with us and fill us up and turn us afresh to the Lord Jesus Christ in whom we receive one blessing after another. And in his name we pray. Amen.
Bob Lepine: I'm Bob Lepine. As we're discovering, the Apostle Paul endured one hardship after another, and each one was worse than the last. And yet he described them as light and momentary afflictions. So how's that possible? Next weekend we'll find out. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the learning is for living.