Dear Student of the Word,
We are approaching the end of our Corinthians study. After this week, there are only two more installments remaining. I think we will move on to Paul's letters to Timothy after that, but for now, we still have a lot more work to do in Second Corinthians.
My admiration for Paul is well-documented. In a few weeks, I will participate in a cruise that retraces the steps of Paul through Greece and modern Turkey. I can't wait. One of the places we will visit is Corinth, where I have been on three other occasions. To subscribe to the updates from that trip, I urge to subscribe to my regular blog updates. Go the site, enter your email address and you will receive what I write about 4-5 times a week. Or send me your email address and I will add it for you if you don't have access to the Internet except for email.
This week I wrote:
v. 30 – Paul determined to talk and write about his weakness, and his “weakness” was certainly manifest in his ability to pastor and oversee churches over a long distance in the midst of intense personal pressure. When Paul mentioned “weakness” here, it is in the context of his terrible external pressures and challenges and not his internal failures and shortcomings. This discussion of weakness in these verses has caused many people to justify, glory in and focus on things that they aren’t gifted and graced to do.
This is the wrong conclusion from this and the following verses. Do you think Paul did what he did by not using every strength and gift that he had, rather relying on the things he wasn’t gifted to do? Absolutely not! That's absurd! He suffered greatly because of what God called him to do and it was in that weakness that he accomplished his task.
Please don’t think that God is going to give you work to do that will be unsuited to your personal gift mix. If you can’t sing, God isn’t going to put you in charge of the choir, so you can boast of your weakness! Do you need to rethink this whole concept of weakness from this context? Has it caused you to be sloppy about your work? Has it caused you to deny what you can do so that you won’t seem strong? We’ll discuss this more in the days to come.
Remember that the Bible study archives of 14 other New Testament studies can be found on my website along with The Faith Files, a study of every verse on faith in the New Testament. You can unsubscribe by clicking on the link below. You can give a gift subscription by going to the site where these studies are posted every week.
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Download this week's study: Download 2_corinthians_study_9.doc
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