The keynote to our occupation at this time is in the Second Letter to the Corinthians.
In Chapter 4:
Therefore seeing we have this ministry, even as we obtained mercy, we faint not.
This Second Letter to the Corinthians is all about the ministry of the church. You notice that the apostle puts it in the plural. He is not only speaking about himself and Timothy, and other fellow workers separated to the gospel, but, as we shall see, he means himself and the believers whom he is addressing.
That comes very clearly from place to place: that it is in his mind the ministry of the Lord’s people—the ministry of the church, which is just the aggregate of all born-again, Holy Spirit-indwelt people of God.
That is what he says in Chapter 1: God “anointed us with you.” It is the church’s anointing unto the service of the Lord, and that is what we are going to be occupied with. We shall have to underline that as we go on.
Let me say concerning this particular letter: the Lord has been leading me again into it more deeply than ever recently. It is the richest and most valuable document in the New Testament on divine service.
I think there is no other book that is so rich in its content on this matter: the service of the people of God. Probably before we are through, you will agree with that, if you do not already recognise it.
This letter is the testament of Christ’s greatest servant as to what the service of the Lord means, and did mean, in his own case. He was a representation of the church in every way.
He did not only see the church mentally and doctrinally. The church was himself in very being, in very life. The truth of the church came out of him as well as into him. It proceeded from his own inner history with God.
In a very real sense, he was the embodiment of the church and the truth of the church. Therefore, if the church is the ministering vessel of Christ in this dispensation, to the world and in the world, the Apostle Paul, in a very full and deep way, embodies the principle of service.
Later in this letter, he will speak about our being workers together with God. If ever there was a man who was a worker together with God, it was this man.
But, you see, the point is that it was not just Paul, the servant of Jesus Christ, in the sense of being a personal unit. It was Paul as the compass of all the meaning of the church’s service.
We know and understand that when we see the Lord Jesus—really see Him—we see God. We see what God is like. We come to the knowledge and understanding of God in Christ; that comes into the letter, as we shall see.
But when we see His greatest servant, we see what the service of God means. We come to understand what the church’s ministry really is.
That is why I said that this letter is, in a peculiar way, the testament of this great—perhaps greatest—servant of the Lord Jesus. That is, it was and is not a treatise. It is not an argument on doctrine.
There is very little doctrine in this letter in a systematic or technical sense. There is any amount of doctrine, but it is not called doctrine; it is not talked about as doctrine. It is all experience.
It was not intended to be either a letter, an epistle, or a document setting forth the doctrine of Christ and of Christianity. It was the outpouring of a man’s heart from his experience as a servant of God to the Lord’s people, with the intent to show the Lord’s people what the service of the Lord really is.
You see, that is the nature of this letter. It is not a treatise at all on some theme of the gospel. It hardly deals with doctrine in that sense. It is altogether practical, from beginning to end.
From the very first words—and you will see that in a moment—right to the end, it is so practical that if we stay with it, even parts of a sentence challenge us. We are faced with practical issues as to the meaning of our being for Christ in this world.
What does it mean that we, being related to the Lord Jesus, are here on this earth? We are challenged, I say, all the way through on that question. So completely practical is this letter.
Now, before we can proceed into the letter, we must make another note. You will find that this letter is probably—yes, not probably, but actually—more autobiographical than any other letter that Paul wrote.
There is a lot of autobiography in the Letter to the Galatians, but not half so much as in this letter. The man is talking about his own experiences all the way through, either by definite statement or by implication.
There are numerous things here which, if we only knew it, are related to what happened to the Apostle Paul. First, there are plenty of things mentioned as such; many others are not said exactly to be that, but are so clearly related to his own experience when you come to close study.
So, from the first half-sentence to the end of the letter, speaking out of his own experience as a servant of the Lord, he is showing us the way of service: what we may expect, what service really is.
I say, he is saying it out from his own heart—what he himself not only had gone through, but was still going through.
This is clear if you go long enough and quietly enough with it. Some of the very first words of the letter are a specimen of what I am saying about the whole letter. Look at them again:
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God, and Timothy our brother, unto the church of God which is at Corinth, with all the saints that are in the whole of Achaia.
You might say, “Well, that is his way of introducing his letter.” He always had an introduction to his letters—not always in the same form—but this is the one for this particular occasion, this letter. So he just opens with this kind of prelude to the letter.
Well, it is that, but it is much more than that—much more than that. We have got to look at this prelude, as we may call it, because there are two implications here which are really the introduction to the whole letter.
The whole letter is implied in these two things. There is an implication here in a twofold way:
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God.
Now, you Corinthians, get it? Listen to that. Take that. You Corinthians have been saying—this is what you find—“This man, he is not a true apostle. He never did personally see Jesus Christ.”
“He is a false apostle, making claims for himself which cannot be supported. He never saw Jesus in the flesh. He was not one of the chosen twelve by the Lord Jesus. He has come into apostleship by the back door.”
Oh, these Corinthians had said worse things than that about him. You will see presently one of them: “Why, Paul? No, he is not a true apostle. Jesus never called Paul in the flesh. We know Peter, and we know John, and we know the others. Jesus called and said, ‘Follow Me.’ Paul was never one of them.”
But we know the rest, do we not? We know about the Lord meeting him, and his meeting the Lord, on the way to Damascus. But these Judaizers, who had crept into Corinth, tried to discredit this man in every possible way and had captured a large and influential group in Corinth, who would have Peter, who would have Apollos, but would not have Paul.
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God.” You know, it might not help you very much where the Apostle Paul is concerned, but it is a tremendous strength in principle if we know in our own hearts, with true assurance, that where we are, we are by the will of God.
What we are in is by the will of God. Our position is because of the will of God. Where we live is the will of God for us, for the time being at any rate. Where we meet with the Lord’s people, that is the will of God for us.
What we are doing in this life, we know to be God’s will for us. You know, that is a tremendous strength. This man could not have gone through all that he had to meet—not only in Corinth, but everywhere—if he had not had inner heart assurance and confidence and certainty that what he was and what he was doing was not of his own choice, but by the will of God.
Tremendous strength, is it not? That was the strength of this man. As we go on, we shall see how that was borne out. Yes, it was God right enough. We have no difficulty over Paul as to the will of God in that man’s life.
But here, you see, he is taking up the challenge right at the beginning of the letter—the challenge that is to be met right through—and answering it on this ground: “I am where I am with the assurance that it is God’s doing. I am what I am because God has made me. It is God who stands behind my life and ministry.”
Now, that is the first thing about workers together with God—the service of the Lord’s people. If we are where we are because we know it is the will of God, we have a great strength for testimony and life where we are.
They had said otherwise. This is his affirmation, which through many centuries has been borne out as true. But then they had said, “This man is an autocrat. He is a law unto himself. He is seeking to make a name for himself. He is gathering people around him, that he shall be their lord. This man is of an independent nature and disposition.”
His answer? What is it?
And Timothy our brother, and all the saints that are in the whole of Achaia.
No, no, I am no isolated unit. I am no independent member. I am not just seeking a name for myself, a following for myself. Timothy—ask Timothy. All the saints in Achaia—ask them.
Here is another principle of ministry introduced at once. Remember, all the way down, this letter is the letter of ministry, of service, of the work of the Lord. Everything here is a principle of that service.
You cannot— you cannot—serve the Lord in isolation, in detachment, in independence. You must be a part of the Body of Christ, the church. You must be labouring in fellowship with the Lord’s people. You must not be a detached law unto yourself.
This principle of fellowship is essential to effective testimony. That is why the enemy is so concerned to isolate, divide, separate, and cut us up, or make us run away and isolate ourselves. This drive is always upon us.
Perhaps more than once you have felt like the psalmist: “Oh that I had wings like a dove! Then would I fly away, and be at rest.” Would you? You would not.
If you have ever really become an organic part of the Body of Christ, you too would want to fly back again. You ask any of those servants of God who, by reason of adverse circumstances, have been cut off, if it is not the deepest longing of their hearts to be brought back again into the fellowship which now means more to them than it ever did when they had it.
There is something here in relatedness which is vital to our testimony, our ministry: relatedness—relatedness in heart.
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, and Timothy, and all the saints.” This is an answer, you see. There was a charge laid against him of being autocratic, personally dominating, and isolated in conception. Well, of course, it was a lie. We know it.
But, you know, at that time things were in their infancy. The activities of the evil one, and of evil people—especially these pursuers of the apostle everywhere—were very real. The servant of God was not insensitive to these things.
He did not seek to vindicate himself. He felt it to be incumbent upon him to say very emphatically that the opposite of these charges was the real truth.
Now, you see, you have not got into the letter yet. You have only got to the first two statements in what you call the introduction, but that is the key into which the whole letter will fit.
Now, you see, we are going to come on this again and again in different ways, but it is all what we may expect if we are really committed to this tremendous business of being God’s fellow workers.
Paul suffered something very keenly from cruel reproaches, especially in Corinth—suffering intensely. At that point, we move into the letter.
In this first chapter, as it is marked out—though it really should not be isolated—what are the words that are dominant here? Sufferings and consolation. Put your mark under how often: suffering, suffering, suffering; and consolation, and consolation.
You could say, very rightly, that this is the subject. This is really what is uppermost in his mind: sufferings and consolation.
The first thing that meets us in this letter of the ministry of God’s people is that the service of the Lord has its roots in, and is rooted by, suffering.
He says here, “All our affliction”; “the sufferings of Christ which abound unto us” are abundant in our experience.
Dear friends, if we have not settled it, sooner or later we shall have to settle it and find grace to overcome our murmuring and our complaining about the sufferings which we have as Christians.
It is a long time to do that. What we shall have to settle early in this matter—and that is why it is at the beginning of the letter—is the inevitability of afflictions if we are going to mean anything to the Lord at all.
If the Lord is going to have anything by us, or from us, that is the meaning of service and ministry. Do not think of that word ministry as something official. Just rule that right out. Do not think of a pastor, “the minister,” a ministerial class, or profession.
This language, this phraseology, which has crept into the service of God, is all so false and misleading when people say, “I am going into the ministry.”
I remember a man who had been very much in ministry—continually in ministry, here, there, and everywhere—and I think used of the Lord. I think he had been in it for about thirty years.
One day I was walking along at a Keswick Convention and met him. He had a clerical collar on. I had not seen it before, and he saw my eyebrows go up. He said, “You see, brother, I have gone into the ministry.”
Well, it makes you want to vomit. It is horrible. I am not talking about that sort of thing.
I am talking about what the Lord gets from our lives. That is our ministry. That is being workers together with God: what the King is getting.
Let me say it again, on the authority not only of so many and so much, but on this representative man’s authority—the authority of his whole life: if we are of any value to the Lord, there is going to be suffering. Make no mistake about that.
If you and I seek to avoid it, keep out of its way, refuse it, or rebel against it, we are cutting the very artery of our spiritual service.
We have not got where this man got to, and I am not saying that I have—do not think that for a moment. But I trust we are moving in that direction.
At the end, after all that is in this Second Letter to the Corinthians—oh, and how much there is when you come to read it about this subject, suffering, and all that came into that man’s life—at the end of it, when he is in prison and the executioner’s axe is waiting, he says:
That I may know Him, and the fellowship of His sufferings.
After all! So we have not got there. But why could he say that? Still again, “to know the fellowship of His sufferings”? Because he had learned that all the values came along that line.
All the values that he had, all that he had come to see, his calling in Christ for time and for eternity, had come to him through the sufferings of Christ being shared.
We may shrink from even saying things like that, but what I am saying is this, dear friends: this explains a lot, does it not? It explains a lot of experience.
But the point for the moment is that, for any value to the Lord, afflictions are inevitable. Without inviting them, they will come. Without putting ourselves in the way of them, we shall be there, sharing the afflictions of Christ, as the apostle calls them here.
These things brought upon this apostle such acute suffering. They aimed at him not to bring him down from some recognised exalted position—for they were not accepting any exalted position on his part, indeed quite the opposite—but they were thrust upon him with the intention of showing what a poor man he was.
They were trying to make him seem quite a poor, contemptible little man. Hold that for a minute. He would have agreed with them on that thoroughly, and again and again said as much.
One of the sufferings will be that people find out our faults and make a lot of them—our imperfections. Have you known, dear friends, that there has never yet been a fruitful servant of the Lord who was faultless?
Abraham had his faults. You are amazed that so great a man could have his faults written into the eternal record. Yet he was used of God in God’s work and God’s service.
He did the same thing twice over: lied to save his own skin. You would think that after the first time, and what he suffered from it, he would never do that again; then he went and did it again. That is Abraham. It is in the Scripture. The Bible has not been written to cover over these things.
Moses—was he faultless? Great and grand things are said about him: Moses, the servant of the Lord. But we could stay, could we not, and put our finger upon the faults—grievous and glaring faults—in Moses.
One crowning fault deprived him of his life’s ambition to go over into the land. The Lord said, “Do not speak to Me any more about it.”
Moses. David—oh, dear David. Not a pleasant story, is it, the faults of David? Isaiah, wonderful prophet—yet a wonderful prophet, wonderfully used, a prince among prophets—crying, “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.”
So you go out of the Old Testament and into the New. What about these poor disciples? We could spend a lot of time dwelling on their faults, and they are put in the record.
Now, here are the chief servants of the Lord through the ages—men of faults. Never think, or we should never think, of any other being infallible—not even the Apostle Paul.
These people, you see, took hold of those faults to make them the ground of discrediting the man altogether.
So there is consolation in that. Where do we find comfort in there? The Lord, as Martin Luther says, knows a great deal more than the devil does about our faults. He knows us. He knew us before He called us—all about us—and knows all about us.
Yes, all our faults that other people do not even see; and He knows all those that they do see and make a lot of. That does not necessarily put us out of that wonderful position of being workers together with God.
It did not in the case of any of those I mentioned. They were such, but God! As we go on in this letter, we shall see more of that very thing.
These people wanted to make the faults of this dear man the ground on which he himself should be thoroughly discouraged and should despair because of what he was in himself, and of discrediting him before all others.
And no man knew better than Paul did how faulty he was. With Paul, it was a continual marvel and wonder that ever the Lord looked in his direction to make him His servant.
He said, “Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious.” He looked upon such a one and made him His servant.
So now, the marvel of God’s grace and mercy in allowing us—nay, more than that, taking action to bring us into fellowship with Himself in His service—means that no one need be discouraged by their faults.
Now, you see, I said we are challenged all the way along. Once more, the battle of usefulness to the Lord is on in this particular respect: that we are made conscious—we are conscious, and we are made conscious all the way along.
The more we seek to be of use to the Lord, the more committed to the Lord we are, the more abandoned to His interests, the more we shall find discouragement in our own selves.
Yes, the nearer to utter and final despair we shall get if we look at ourselves.
When we started, of course, in the Lord’s service, well, I do not know what we thought about ourselves. I can remember—it is sixty years ago since I started preaching—and I did it very boldly and strongly.
When I think of it now, I do not think I had very much sense of what a poor specimen I was. I was rejoicing in the Lord’s work, of course, and so on; but I was not very much bothered about myself.
But after all that time, I tell you, dear friends, this very day I could most easily give up because of the consciousness—the very consciousness—of the worthlessness of this vessel.
Well, that was Paul in principle. He did not have any argument against this kind of charge: “Oh, you are no good. You are no good. You are right, very weak, worthless fellow. Look at this and that which you did. It shows the kind of man you are really underneath.”
He does not stand out for himself on that ground. What he does say is, “In me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.” You are perfectly right—and more right than you know you are. If you knew the whole truth, you would have a lot more to say against me.
But Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus by the will of God. The will of God transcends all this other, because the will of God is the will of infinite grace, infinite mercy.
God has not chosen us for what we are in ourselves. No. “Who is sufficient for these things?” he will cry in a minute. “Our sufficiency is from God; who also made us sufficient as ministers of a new covenant.”
Not what we are, but what He is.
Now I have only started. I was going to speak about the sufferings of the apostle in the two realms, but time has gone. I have been talking to you already three-quarters of an hour and more, and if I go on it will be as long again.
But perhaps this helps us at the beginning. It opens a window. It says: if we are going to be any use to the Lord, we shall meet these kinds of afflictions to begin with.
We shall meet the afflictions and the sufferings of those who, by any means, try to discredit us, take the heart out of us by enlarging upon, magnifying, or underlining our own imperfections and faults.
They will even lay the charge at our door that we are false, that we have no right to be what we are claiming to be.
And this is all I am going to say now: this repeated, reiterated word, suffering, is the introduction to the service of the Lord.
It says to us so strongly that any value—any spiritual value—to the Lord will come out of suffering. That is how, as we shall see presently, we have got to react to our sufferings.
It is a deep and hard lesson: to react in the right way to our sufferings—how to view them, what to do with them, how to handle them.
So there is a real battle in that realm, to get us properly adjusted to the inevitable. Our flesh cries out for relief.
Yes, I have prayed a few times, “Oh Lord, give me some respite. Give me a period of calm waters. Let up the fight for a bit.”
Well, not yet. Not yet.
But there is another compensation. We have not got that far: consolation—what the consolations are. I am not going to hint at them now, because they want more time than we have.
I will say this: they will not always, if ever, be the Lord coming along and saying, “Dear man, dear woman, do not worry. Be quite comforted. Just go on, and I am with you.”
I do not find it comes that way. I would like it. Oh, I have often said, “Oh, for Daniel’s experience! Oh, that it might be said to me, ‘O man greatly beloved,’ sent by an archangel from heaven.” Would that not be grand? I would call that consolation, would you not?
No, it does not seem to come that way for us. But there are consolations, and I will keep you waiting for the time being, because they want more time than we have.
Now, I said I opened the window. You look through, and what you will see is just this: that in real usefulness and value to the Lord, we are going to have a hard time in the flesh, but there are going to be compensations in the Spirit.
Those compensations are really much more—much more—to the heart. They are compensations indeed. They will make us say, “Well, if the suffering means this, all right. Certainly, it is all right. It is worth it. It is worth it.”
There we must leave it. It is not very far into the letter, but you see, we have all day tomorrow—Monday.