Happy birthday to RF member Denise. She hasn't been on here in a while, but we wish her the best, nonetheless.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Happy New Year's Eve, Family!

I just published another post on my blog with heartfelt prayer and blessings to all who may read it.....

Love you!

https://forrealone.wordpress.com/2023/12...gs-to-you/

In the church at Corinth, those who complained Paul didn't come to visit when promised likely included some who didn't really want to see him. They just wanted to complain about him. That the church had finally done the right thing about the member who had sinned egregiously didn't mean they were eager to welcome Paul back. This next chapter deals with this issue.

The logic here is that it's not about Paul, but about Christ. The Lord's grace is the power to change, to become more like Christ. It's one thing to have that grace; it's another to give it room to work and change you. Paul pleads with them not to stop at the threshold of faith, but to come on and make themselves at home. He quotes from Isaiah 49, a passage where the prophet declares that God is calling His people back from wandering morally. The same message applies to Corinth, because they had gotten far off track. Paul notes that the door to God's courts is always open -- any time is the right time to seek His face.

How could anyone take offense at that message? Sure, the path is difficult, but Paul didn't build it; God did. Let them bring a complaint against Paul that will stand in God's Presence. Paul and his team had consistently presented themselves as mere servants of the Lord. No matter what they went through, they sincerely served the gospel. Paul lists nine things they faced: they couldn't give up, they faced persecution, hassles, challenges, beatings, arrests, riots, hard work, sleepless nights and starving. He also tells of nine ways he handled such sorrows: never compromising, knowing God's Word, patient with people, not being a burden to anyone, relying on the Holy Spirit, operating in sacrificial compassion, clinging to the message, and leaving room for God to work.

But there are ten fruits proving that God does work: He equips for every task, grants the dignity of grace while the flesh dies, they were accused of evil for telling the good news, slandered as tramps while clinging to faith, nobodies who were recognized everywhere, killed and yet somehow still alive, punished but allowed to live, always in grief yet celebrating, beggars who made others wealthy, bereft of material possession but always fully supplied. By this time the folks in Corinth would have recognized things Paul had experienced that matched those lists. It's not bragging; it's simply being honest. God had carried Paul and his team through an awful lot.

Indeed, Paul had hidden nothing from them, and he loved them all unreservedly. He never put restrictions on them, but they had restricted themselves in trusting him. They were his own spiritual children; he appealed to them to reciprocate his love for them. It was they who kept themselves back from the rich blessings of God.

He uses an image of two completely different draft animals hitched together. They could not pull in the same harness and get anywhere, each having a different pace and abilities. Believers belong to Christ; the rest of the world belongs to the Devil. How do you reconcile righteousness and wickedness? It's as different as night and day. We are committed to Christ; they don't even believe in Him. How can the living temples of Christ become entangled in pagan idolatry?

Paul quotes Leviticus 26 where God insists that His nation must be holy so He can live among them and share His unspeakable wealth with them. He redeemed them in the Exodus, breaking the power of the Egyptian empire. Then he cites Isaiah 52 in a passage where God calls out to His people in offering yet another exodus from their slavery to some other imperial power. We were bought with a price; Christ has a priority claim on us.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Paul carries on discussing the distinction between the realms of flesh and spirit.

He first uses the symbol of this fleshly existence as living in a tent, while our future in Eternity is our real home. It is only natural that, once we understand the meaning of this parable, then we would long for home. Then he shifts to the symbolism of being naked in the flesh, but clothed in the spirit. The Presence of the Holy Spirit in our souls is like a security deposit that we hold. It ensures we can believe God's promise to bring us to Himself when this life is over.

Paul is like that himself. He'd rather be in Heaven with the Lord, but knows he must tolerate this life a little longer. While here, we cannot really see everything as clearly as we would like, so we substitute our faith (our trust and our convictions) in place of eyesight. Our perception does not rely on what our senses and our reason tell us. There will come a time when we will leave behind the flesh with it's senses and reason, so whatever the flesh can know isn't very important.

But whether here or there, our highest priority is pleasing the Lord. Paul refers to the image of standing before our Master's judgment seat; He is the one who decides whether we have been faithful to His expectations. And because we recognize the gravity of this situation, we carry a strong testimony, seeking to win people over to joining us. The wording in Greek here emphasizes reaching out to strangers as those who might not know God. By contrast, God knows us better than we know ourselves.

And it's for sure the church at Corinth should know Paul well enough to recognize all of this as the way he did things. He didn't hammer them with the fearful consequences of God's disfavor, but carefully avoided flexing human organizational authority over them. This was not a campaign to convince them to bow before his authority; he wanted them to recognize how he was wooing them as family to get back on the path home. Would they have been more proud of him if he had been harsh? Would it not be something to boast of to the lost souls of this world that God could be found through humbling oneself? Paul was treating them with the gentleness of God. This is our testimony to those who put too much stock in the worldly appearance of authority.

Paul echoes some of their ugly comments to him in letters we do not have now. They complained that, because his actions didn't make sense to them, he must be crazy. Yes, he's obsessed with pleasing the Lord. If that's madness, so be it. But by contrast, he was quite gentle and reasonable with them. And the reason is because Christ demonstrated His authority through is sacrificial love on the Cross. Because of that sacrifice, it became possible for people to serve Him, without having to somehow qualify beforehand. They become acceptable by the Cross, and He grants them power to turn their lives around and live for Him. Paul was following that example.

We who follow Christ no longer pay much attention to the system of human authority. Rather than use the world's system of marking who is who, we look at people with the eyes of Christ. He is the standard. Anyone who submits fully to Him is no longer a mere human, but a Child of Eternity. It's a transformation that exceeds our human understanding. This is the ministry of reconciliation. The Creator reached out to the damned souls of men and reconciled them to Himself through His Son, Jesus. We who serve Him carry forth that ministry of reconciliation. That reconciliation was Paul's ministry.

God was using Paul as an emissary. The Lord made His Son, who had no acquaintance at all with sin, to own the sins of the entire world, so that we could own His righteousness. And having become His children, He still calls and woos us to reconcile with Him when we stray. It's already ours; we can rely on Christ's sacrifice to cover our sins even now. This was how Paul dealt with the horrific mistakes the church at Corinth made.

Hope your day is a good one

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Looking at our metrics, there's a decent chunk of us that access the site on a phone. Those of you who do that, is the forum difficult to use, at least compared when you access on a full screen computer? I've been thinking of doing some minor work with the widths of things and the font sizes, so that if you're on a mobile device, there will be less squinting/zooming in and scrolling. I notice I have to do that a lot when I check things out on my phone, especially in portrait mode.

The church at Corinth was larger than most. As with any congregation anywhere else, its membership ranged from spiritually mature at one extreme, down to those who were infiltrating enemies seeking to destroy the fellowship at the other extreme, and everything in between. It didn't matter what motives drove those who criticized Paul's leadership; those who were still struggling to overcome the flesh needed some ammunition. Sometimes you need to state the obvious so that it forms a mental structure that supports faith.

The only reason Paul writes so much about himself here is to provide that structure. It is neither anger nor panic; it's really not even a defense. It's an explanation of how things work. Paul is not going to bail out on them. He's willing to struggle with them because there's nothing to hide and nothing to lose. He has the confidence to let people evaluate him and his work by their own convictions.

The only people who cannot tolerate Paul and his message are those who still belong to this world. The Devil has blinded them to the truth, persuading them to rely on their own fallen capabilities, as he has done ever since the Garden. His captives cannot receive something that speaks only to the spirit, since their spirits remain dead. Their minds are closed so that Christ cannot reveal Himself to them as the very manifestation of God in human form.

Paul never promoted himself, but Christ as Lord. The apostles and those assisting them were servants of Christ, which makes them also servants of Christ's Elect. Thus, Paul was the servant of the folks at Corinth. The same God who said, "Let there be light" is the One who shone His light in the hearts of believers so that they could see the glory of Christ. This transforms the heart, which in turn transforms the mind. This is the foundation of Paul's confidence as an apostle. He was a nobody, a simple clay utility vessel, but who bore the incalculable treasure of miracles that come from God, not something Paul ginned up.

It was a critical distinction, since Paul had no power in his flesh. He carries on in the language of paradox, asserting over and over again that the man was nothing, but the power God placed in him was beyond measure. His flesh was squeezed hard by troubles, but his spirit was never crushed. His flesh had no answers, but his spirit never despaired. He was hounded everywhere he went, but his spirit never felt abandoned. His flesh had been body-slammed countless times, but his spirit never perished. He was always carrying the death sentence of Jesus so that Jesus could live in his body. Thus, while death was eating away at his flesh, the church was still very much alive.

This same spirit of faith had been around since at least the time of King David. In Psalm 116, David declared that his human sorrows could not actually do him any harm as long as he testified faithfully of God's revelation. David understood the vast difference between flesh and spirit, and the paradox of having a foot in two different realms of existence; this is the same faith Paul carried to Corinth and the rest of the world. Anything that happens to Paul in this life cannot affect his election. If Jesus rose up from the grave, so would Paul, and so would the rest of the Elect.

The existence of a church at Corinth was reason enough for Paul to have faced every sorrow of the flesh. A faithful servant could reach a few; a thriving church was a beacon calling the masses. Divine grace was overflowing into the world, bringing more and more people into the Kingdom and generating a tsunami of glory and praise.

Again, Paul was not giving up on the church at Corinth, despite the sorrow they caused him. If his flesh got used up on just this one congregation, it simply meant that his spirit could gain more ascendancy over the flesh. The death of his body was a cheap price to pay for what was waiting on the other side of death. That vast treasury of eternal glory was where he focused his attention, not on the fading shadows of this life. He did not regret having worked so hard in Corinth, nor all the sorrow that kept chasing after him since leaving there.