Tag: New Testament

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The Worthiness of Jesus – 2 Corinthians 2:1-17

In these six verses, Paul shows us four important realities about Jesus. Paul is writing to the church in Corinth, a city that is morally autonomous and morally unmoored. The notion of the exclusivity of Christ was difficult for the culture to swallow, much as it is today. And there was a great deal of Corinth still in the Corinthian church. (Much as it is today.)

If Jesus is worthy, risk in relationships is unavoidable. Paul took a risk in his relationship with the Corinthians, and that relationship broke. They rejected his teaching and the wisdom of God in him.

In the American church, Jesus has become very ordinary, developing apathy, demanding nothing and enabling assimilation. We do not look much like the New Testament church, but rather look like the culture around us.

If Jesus is worthy, then life will be a paradox. Jesus is continually leading Paul as a captive to his death. Paul is providing a high definition picture of this paradox of life and death. Paul’s opponents would have called out how feeble, weak and pathetic Paul is – and Paul himself would boast in it, because it is in his weakness that Jesus is glorified and His strength is demonstrated.

If Jesus is worthy, then our words have weight in the world. God the Father delights in the worthiness and sacrifice of Christ, and does the same when Paul imitates Christ by giving up his life. But be because that fragrance is the fragrance of death, of giving up our lives as Christ did, those words frightens many off – those who are perishing. But for those who are being saved, those words are a path to salvation.

If Jesus is worthy, then we will be gripped by the gravity of the Gospel. Paul here calls out the false teachers who are gaining wealth by peddling the word of God in order to earn money. They did not feel the weight of the gospel.

Likewise, we must ask if the wealth and comfort that we live in is making the gospel seem less weighty. Jesus says that it is very difficult for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God, which means the vast majority of us in America are at a severe disadvantage.

God finds supreme satisfaction in His Son, and invites us to do the same.

– Sermon Notes, Brian Bailey, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, February 4, 2017

2 Corinthians 2:1-17

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Your Wrath is Not Righteous – 2 Corinthians 2:1-11

To start, again, some background.
Paul founded the church of Corinth, then spent 18 months there. Sometime later, Paul writes to the church, warning about their need to deal with the sin in their midst (this is part of 1 Corinthians), specially, a man’s affair with his step-mother.

Paul subsequently visits Corinth and the disciplinary process begins, apparently not well. He then writes the “Severe Letter” which has been lost (probably for the best), and plans to visit Corinth again, but is prevented. Finally, he writes 2 Corinthians, trying to ratchet some some of what has happened in response to his letters and visit.

That second visit was distressing, even traumatic. As it is for many pastors, Paul is fatigued by being the one people call only when they are in crisis, particularly when dealing with sin against them or by them. In many ways it is a privilege to be in these situations, but when they are the primary way you interact with people, it takes a toll.

This is something all pastors deal with, and Paul in particular has been dealing with this in regards to the Corinthians. This is why he wants them to deal with their issues internally. This is one reason he is glad not to be able to visit them as he had planned. When he comes to them, he wants it to be a joyful experience.

He then explains the background of his initial confrontation of the sin in the church, explaining that the motive was his concern for them, not just his personal desire to be “the hammer.” It is a legitimate concern, but Paul wants to dispel it.

The tone here is very different from Paul’s initial condemnation, where he called on them to hand the man over to Satan. Now, he calls them to forgive him, to avoid themselves falling under the influence of Satan.

We see here in the Corinthians the human tendency to jump from one extreme to the other. Just as it is important to be clear on the need to confront sin, it is important to offer forgiveness. This is why the gospel has two parts – we are worse than we think we are, but more loved than we can possibly imagine. Humans constantly struggle between justice and mercy.

This time around, Paul is addressing the abuse of justice. One of the most successful strategies of Satan is to take our healthy zeal for justice and produce in us a heart of hate. God’s wrath is justified and righteous – ours, on the other hand, is not so much. The scriptures never justify human wrath. Instead, it is condemned categorically by Christ in Matthew 5, by Paul in Galatians, Ephesians & 1 Timothy, by James. We are called to “get rid of” our wrath, categorized right alongside idolatry and witchcraft. The only text in all the New Testament that gives permission for wrath pretty clearly calls us to keep it limited to 24 hours (“do not let the sun go down on your anger.”). God’s perfect wrath is not permission for us to be imperfectly wrathful.

As we seek justice in our communities, we must guard our hearts. We live in an age where wrath and self-righteousness is endemic in social media. We have all created zones of justification where we see our wrath as justified. There are horrific, monstrous things that people do, but we are not called to wrath and vengeance. True justice only comes from God.

We must confront sin, advocate for the oppressed and guard the weak. But we must also guard our hearts. We all have the same depravity within us. We should seek to not feel wrath, but rather pity, in those cases where we are confronted by people who do evil. We should aspire to be like Rachael Denhollander, the gymnast who confronted her abuser and that of hundreds of girls, in her clear, unflinching condemnation of evil, and the bright beacon of Christ’s mercy that she points to.

That evil and that hope exists within each of us. May we each seek to confront that evil, in our life and our world, without giving into it though self-righteousness and wrath.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, January 28, 2017

2 Corinthians 2:11-21

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When Plans Change – 2 Corinthians 1:12-24

Paul here is defending himself from attacks around his change of travel plans to Corinth. The real story, though, is that his teaching is being undermined and criticised by Judaizers who want to require gentile Christians to follow the ceremonial law, become circumcised and so forth.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul notes that he plans to visit Corinth around his visit to Macedonia. In the end, though, that did not come together for reasons outside his control. Paul’s enemies in the church used this as leverage to attack not just Paul, but his teachings in general.

Paul, in turn, uses the story of his human inability to accomplish what he had planned to illustrate God’s supernatural ability and faithfulness to fulfill all his promises. In fact, it is often through the disruption of our plans that God accomplishes his.

There are many things in life that we do not have control over. This can be difficult to accept, especially living in a wealthy society where we are free from many of the things that have historically upset people’s plans (war, plague, etc.). But even today, our control of our lives is much more limited than we often realize.

However, if we recognize that much of this lack of control is actually the hand of Providence, that can change our perspective. Many of us can point to things in our own lives where we have seen Providence work in the past. But we may also be able to point to situations where Providence did not work in a way that we might have hoped.

How do you respond when things spin out of your control? Job losses, disease, injury and much more can upend our plans and send us into a spiral of worry and anxiety. It takes our joy and peace, and sends us away from seeking and serving God as we are called to.

In those seasons, the challenge is to let go of the things of the world, let go of our control, and instead cling to the promises of God. We are, at Paul writes, sealed as God’s, with the Holy Spirit as a deposit of even greater things to come.

– Sermon Notes, Dave Lester, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, January 21, 2017

2 Corinthians 1:12-24

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Suffering and Comfort – 2 Corinthians 1:1-11

Paul wrote four letters to the Corinthians, two of which survive. Paul planted the Corinthian church and stayed with them for 18 months before moving on to more ministry. Shortly after this, all hell broke loose, and, after writing his first two letters, Paul has to head back to Corinth to deal with them.

They rebuff him and he leaves for Ephesus, writing what is called the “Severe Letter”. This letter shakes them into some form of response, including church discipline on the most egregious offenders.

Paul begins writing Second Corinthians, and midway through gets news from Titus about more bad news – a group has infiltrated the church and is undermining Paul’s teaching and very position as an apostle.

So the letter here is largely Paul validating his apostleship by way of his sufferings. The two key words as he opens his letter are “suffering” and “comfort.”

In that instruction, Paul takes a very Old Testament, monotheistic tack, with God as the source of all mercy and compassion. This is in contrast to the popular religion of the day (and ours) where the power of a god is seen in the material successes of its followers.

God divinely encourages Paul who suffers on behalf of the Son, so that he can be a conduit of comfort for others who suffer on behalf of the Son. There’s a whole lot of comforting going on. God meets Paul with sufficient sustainment to meet his level of suffering. The greater the suffering, the greater the comfort – and the greater comfort he can then provide to others.

What does all this mean for the Corinthians, though? As a result of what is happening in Paul, the Corinthians can take encouragement from it as they also suffer in their own way, and be built up and sharpened more and more into the image of God.

Most of us (probably none of us) will not suffer in the specific ways Paul did (shipwrecks, 30 lashes, imprisonment), but if Jesus is as worthy as God says He is, then we must suffer on His behalf.

Paul then shifts from the general to the specific, recounting what he had Jay endured. God undermined Paul’s confidence in himself in order to build up his confidence in Christ. Just as Christ was led to the cross in order that he might be raised from the dead, so good led Paul to within inches of his life so that his self reliance might be left in the grave and he be raised in himself from the dead.

A key word in this passage is “rely” which has its roots in “persuade” – Paul is no longer persuaded of his own abilities. Meanwhile, the Corinthians saw persuasion as a key value, and the infiltrators sought to persuade them of his unfitness, but the persuasion Paul relied upon was that of Christ, not his own abilities.

Like Paul, we are called to make much of Christ in our American-Corinthian culture, to suffer and be comforted by Christ as we seek to live out the Great Commission. The world does not value the sufferings of Christ, but as we follow and suffer with Him, His sufficiency is revealed in our lives, revealing Him to that world.

– Sermon Notes, Brian Bailey, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, January 14, 2017

2 Corinthians 1:1-11

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Seeing and Loving – Matthew 9:35-38

In this passage, we get a picture of how the love of Christ works. When Jesus saw the crowds, he saw their pain. Truly seeing requires more attention than most of us give.

He sees them as three things: harassed, helpless and like sheep without a shepherd. They were harassed and troubled by life, poverty, oppression and disease. They were helpless against this suffering, and entirely without outside help to address it.

Unlike Jesus, we tend to wear blinders to suffering. When we pull up next to someone begging on a street corner, we tend to look straight ahead and hope the light changes. In our information age, we can get “disaster fatigue” as the sheer amount of data about suffering can numb us to it. We become so overwhelmed with what we can’t do that we can ignore the little that we can do.

In Luke, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan as an example of seeing suffering and responding to it. Christ’s very presence on earth, through the incarnation, was a living example of compassion for humanity.

This love led him to respond in three ways listed here. He taught the people who God was. He called people into his kingdom, and he brought physical healing and fullness to the sick and broken.

We are called to both proclaim the love of God, and to be the mechanism of God’s love in this world.

But Jesus does not stop there. He sees the suffering, responds in compassion to alleviate that suffering, but then closes this section by bringing others into this process. This is God’s plan – for us to bring others into the active love of God. We are not called to be silent about what we are doing, but rather to bring more people into it.

There are many on need – “the harvest is plenty” – but too few who respond in the radical love of Christ.

Our focus should be on the wholeness of people, both physical and spiritual. There are three practical ways we can do this.

The first is through our affluence. Most of us in America are fantastically wealthy in a the global context. We can share this with those doing good work.

We can use our influence, in various different ways, whether on behalf of people or directly into their lives.

And finally, we can give our time.

At Advent, we celebrate the coming of God to restore humanity, and we seek to answer His call to join Him in that restoration: pointing people to Him, meeting their needs directly, and bringing others into this cycle of love.

– Sermon Notes, Jeff Krabach, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, December 17, 2017

Matthew 9:35-38

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Surprised by Authentic Joy – Luke 2:8-20

Why is authentic joy something Christians need to be concerned about? Why does it matter that we are happy?

The short answer is that God commands us to be joyful, throughout both the Old and New Testament. It is an earth shattering concept that we are commanded to feel a particular emotion. We do not have immediate control over our emotions. We can fake it, and often do, but we can’t just snap our fingers and become authentically happy. Those who struggle with depression understand this particularly well.

We can understand God calling us to do certain things, but the idea that we need to feel a certain way is hard. We are called to possess something that we cannot possess in our own power. We cannot produce our own joy, but it must be produced within us.

There is a joy that God offers us that is beyond our most joyful moments, but there is a threat to our joy that is also beyond our understanding.

But where does our Joy come from? It comes from a person: Jesus Christ. CS Lewis titled the story of his conversion “Surprised by Joy” because he was startled by the notion that there is a connection between God and joy. We cannot get that kind of joy from any other person, or any material thing. As Lewis writes:

Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things. We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy.

Back to the passage: the shepherds are in the fields watching the sheep. An angel appears and, as people always do when they see an angel, they basically wet themselves. But the angel says not to be afraid – that it brings good news, “evangelion” – often used to describe a king returning victorious from a battle. And this news brings “great joy” – because “to you”, the shepherds themselves, is born a savior. And not just any savior, but the promised Anointed One.

Joy at this news permeates these first few chapters of Luke. Elizabeth, Zechariah and even the unborn John are joyful at the heralding of Christ. Simeon and Anna likewise rejoiced at seeing the infant king.

Why do we need a savior? What blocks us from joy? Sin, the separation from our creator, is the deepest and darkest fate possible. We live under a curse, exposed to and deserving of the wrath of God. The only one qualified to lift that curse is the one who God sent in the flesh, who lived the life we could not life and died the death we could not die.

In John 15-17, Jesus prays that the joy that exists between him and the Father would extend to his disciples. Joy is the emotion of salvation.

How do we then define authentic joy? Joy is the good feeling that is produced by the Holy Spirit that causes us to rest fully in Jesus’ life and death and resurrection and reign for our salvation.

– Sermon Notes, Chris Gorman, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

Luke 2:8-20

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The Story of Us and Also Paul – 1 Corinthians 16:5-24

All of us are the lead characters in our own story. Sometimes our stories are driven by our decisions, sometimes by things outside of our control. We want to control how our stories are told (see Facebook) but also don’t generally consider our own stories to be particularly interesting. We don’t usually have epic adventures or amazing, exotic encounters.

Paul could certainly be considered to have had an amazing story – but the most important parts were not his shipwrecks and great speeches or even his conversion on the road to Damascus. They were his relationships, created by the Providence of God.

Priscilla and Acquila, businesspeople who become leaders under Paul’s training, and who went on to train Apollos, a Egyptian who went on to become a great leader as well. Timothy, Paul’s fearful Turkish/Jewish intern who was trained up into a pastor and saint. Even Stephanas, Fortunatas and Achaicus, who we know nothing about except that they were key characters in the early Church.

The key parts of Paul’s life were not the cinematic high points, but the impact he had on the people he came in contact with.

Paul believed two things about how God works: God plans things in His providence, and that we need to take every opportunity available to do God’s work.

Paul also understood that the work of God was not just dependent on him, but on the work of many others throughout the world. Those who he led to Christ now in turn refresh him. Paul didn’t just minister to others, but he also received ministry from those he led to Christ. That’s the kingdom of God on Earth.
He had to stay in Ephesus, but knew that the work of God continued elsewhere.

God is always at work. Through Providence, he puts particular people in our lives at particular times with particular purposes. Do we use those relationships only for our own good and own purposes? Or do we take the opportunities we are given to demonstrate the love of God in all its various facets? If we pass up these opportunities, God will still work His plan, but we will not be a part of that story.

We need each other to do the work of God. Not just the 20% who naturally get involved and do 80% of the work in most churches, but everyone. The health of a church can be indicated by the proportion of people engaged in the work of the body.

The beauty of the conclusion of this letter to the Corinthians is seeing all the connections that Paul made within the early church, the networks of servanthood and grace that stretched around the world. That is the same beauty we can be a part of every day as we love and serve each other and the world around us.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 16:5-24

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The Discipline of Giving – 1 Corinthians 16:1-4

Some people hate money – not necessarily what money gives you, but the need for and the process of acquiring it. Others love money – not necessarily for what it gives them, but the process of managing it, earning it, etc.

But all of us have to deal with money. It is a prime source of stress, cause of divorce and so on. So it is not a surprise that the Bible has lots to say about money. Some on the best ways to use it (Proverbs), some on not worrying about it (Sermon on the Mount), but a lot also on giving it away.

Paul here, coming off a discussion of the Kingdom of God and the Holy Spirit and all that, as he wraps up, shifts to this very practical, material thing.

He is speaking to a church in a relatively wealthy city. The Greek provinces of Rome where Paul preached like Corinth, Ephesus and Colosse were generally wealthy urban areas. Jerusalem, where the Church began, was a much poorer city with much greater material needs.

At this time, there were only single churches in each city, and the churches were all part of a single seamless, if loose, organization – the “catholic” i.e., universal church. The leaders would come together in Presbyterian-style councils to make broad decisions and settle disputes. So the money being given here was not really for an external organization, but rather for the brothers and sisters within the church.

This section here sets forth a few important concepts about giving that we should keep in mind.

First, giving should be a habit – an ongoing habit, not something that you increase or decrease based on your satisfaction with the church at any one time. It is not supposed to go to specific things that you like or support – it is to go to the church and be distributed as needed. It is not natural – it is a spiritual discipline, just like reading the Bible or prayer. If any of these things are only done spontaneously, they will rarely be done at all.

Who should give? Anyone who is able. The amount should be in keeping with their income. Those without income, barely keeping their heads above water, getting meals from food banks, living in a van down by the river, who should be the ones on the receiving end, should not be the ones giving. Other than that, you should be giving.

Funnily enough, those with little money tend to be better at giving than those with much. Part of that is that those with little money tend to have more empathy for those with less. Part of it is that those who have money tend to have money because they are careful with it and don’t just give it away.

How much should we give? In the Old Testament, you were to give your “first fruits,” the first 10% of the earnings and crops that came in, done twice a year. The New Testament never specifically cites this number, but does keep the concept of “in keeping with your income.” We see widows giving a penny praised, and we see people going out and selling property in order to give more.

So the question is, why does God, who can do miracles and owns all “the cattle on a thousand hills, the wealth in every mine” have to have us give anything? There are lots of answers: we are the hands and feet of God and the mechanism by which He distributes that wealth.

The giving itself is also a mechanism for measuring our faith. When we have means but are stingy with our giving, we are saying that we do not trust God. If we say we love others and love God, the habit of giving is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that.

It is also a way to strengthen our faith. When we live in dependence and give more than is comfortable, it gives us an opportunity to trust God in a new way.

The habit of giving also lets us practice grace. Giving to those you don’t like or that may not deserve it is an imitation of the grace of Christ. If we give only when we want to to those we think have earned it, there is no grace there. By willingly giving things up without maintaining control over the end use of that money, we are, in a small way, following the path of Christ who gave away his life, something of eternal value, for us who did not remotely deserve it.

If you think that the amount you have to give is too paltry, consider that God is not concerned with the dollar amount. He is concerned with the process, with the heart behind it. The economy of God is not the economy of man.

So, the habit of giving tests our faith, strengthens our faith and lets us practice grace. It is an opportunity presented to us by God to participate in His mighty work.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 16:1-4

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The (Super) Nature of the Resurrection – 1 Corinthians 15:29-58

Last week, looking at the first part of 1 Corinthians 15, we covered the idea that humans were created to live in bodies. God Himself came in the form of a human body. But many early Christians struggled with this notion, because the physical world was seen as impure and lesser than the spiritual. The notion of the resurrection of the dead was hard to swallow.

Paul addresses that in chapter 15, beginning from the one thing they all agreed on – Jesus rose from the dead. But if resurrection is impossible then, Paul argues, Christ couldn’t have risen, the gospel is meaningless, faith is meaningless, the martyrs died for nothing, we’re all still under the curse, all believers are still in heel and being a Christian is the dumbest idea possible.

It is, in some ways, a call back to Ecclesiastes – life without Christ is meaningless. But because of the resurrection of Christ and of the dead, Paul has hope.

Then he moves on to a (loose) description of how the resurrection works. He uses the metaphor of the seed, which is an entirely different kinds of thing from the plant that it becomes. Transformations like this are a real thing in the world that we already understand, and if there is a world and dimension beyond this one, it is perfectly logical to imagine that there are transformations that we do not know about or understand.

Some of this brings up questions. Much of this talks about resurrection as a future event at the end times, which seems to contradict other things Paul wrote about regarding being “absent from the body, present with the Lord” and so forth.

There are a number of interpretations of this – maybe resurrection happens immediately but spiritually, or maybe we go to heaven with temporary bodies before the resurrection gets us our permanent ones. This is also where ideas like “soul sleep” and purgatory come in. Or, it may be that we do resurrect immediately, with our new body, because we move outside of time at that point, making questions of present versus future moot.

Regardless, we are told that the final resurrection will be one cosmic event, swallowing up sin and death with finality and transforming that flesh and blood into something new.

Paul here quotes two Old Testament prophecies that come in the context of God’s people Israel constantly rebelling and finally being rejected despite God’s great love for them, and served as a final promise that in the end, God would fully rescue them from the grave.

The fulfillment of this prophecy started with the death and resurrection of Christ, and will be completed with the resurrection of the dead.

This means that life does have meaning. It is the hope of a glorious future that gives us the strength and motivation to live for Christ today. We can push through the struggles because know that the future is glorious. Living the Christian life on earth is difficult if we are doing it right. But if we have just a small understanding of the rewards that will be coming to us in eternity, we can have a blessed hope that pulls us through.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 15:29-58

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Over My Dead Body – 1 Corinthians 15:12-28

In the 19th century, there was a trend of fear of being buried alive, mistaken for being dead. An entire industry of “safety coffins” with bells and other mechanisms to avoid burying someone alive sprang up. This story is a window into our relationship with death.

What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be dead? Plato believed that it was a return to the pre-incarnate collective mind. Others believed in soul-sleep, annihilation or reincarnation. The two things all these views have in common is that your personhood is lost once your body dies, and that your body and soul are separate things.

Orthodox Christianity, though, teaches that God created humans to live forever in bodies. Unfortunately, much of these other concepts have crept into Christianity. We think more about “going to heaven” than we do about the resurrection of the dead. We think about a spiritual heaven, but usually with the implication of bodily things (taste, touch, emotions, etc.).

These sorts of confusions crept in early and helped lead to a number of early heresies about the nature of Christ’s relationship with God, including Adoptionism and Docetism. The latter in particular rejects the idea that Christ died and rose again. In this passage, Paul makes clear that Christ was in fact a man made of flesh and bone and DNA, a counterpart of Adam, who lived and died just like Adam, but who rose again to break Adam’s curse.

The Word became flesh, it did not just put on a layer of flesh. Christ then died, and did not just put on a dumb-show of death, and then truly raised.

The logical Corinthians believed this, but struggled with the notion that people themselves would physically resurrect. They were tempted by a philosophy that said their spirit would raise, not their bodies. But if a physical resurrection is illogical, then so is Christ’s physical resurrection. And if that didn’t happen, then we see all in trouble. All the apostles who saw Him were lying. If Christ didn’t rise, we have no proof that Christ’s sacrifice was accepted, and we are all still in our sins.

But that’s not what’s happening, Paul says. Christ’s resurrection, in fact, is the beginning of story, the “first fruits” of a much greater harvest, the remaking of creation into a new heaven and new earth, where we will live in resurrected bodies. Death and Satan will be destroyed, and everyone will acknowledge Christ as Lord.

The vision God has for our future is not that we can be free from our bodies and free from this corrupted earth, but that we will live forever in better bodies and a better earth.

What does this mean for us? It means we should treat our bodies well, because we are our bodies. They are not simply shells, but they are us. The female body (and male, for that matter) is not shameful. How we treat our bodies matters, and we can sin against our bodies. Who we are starts right now, both physically and spiritually. How we treat other people’s bodies also matters, so the work done to heal, rebuild, maintain and preserve bodies and health is a vital thing. The church, too often, has taken a gnostic view of the body, prioritizing the spiritual only and neglecting physical needs.

All this brings up lots of other questions, many of which we and Paul will address next week.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 15:12-28

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