Our daughters, heavily influenced by Disney films are currently fascinated by the idea of knowing your true love. Sometimes they will ask me who my first girlfriend was. Then they will nod wisely and say “but mummy is your true love.” And they are right.
2 Corinthians 11:1-15 is all about discovering and staying faithful to your true love but in this case, it’s the Gospel. So we are going to see that this means
- Sticking with the true Gospel
- Sticking with true Gospel living
Stick with the true Gospel (v1-4)
This little section starts with a plea that the church might bear with Paul and finishes with an air of frustration that they happily bear with those he describes as “super” or “false” apostles. Paul asks them to bear with his “foolishness”. This is a big clue. Paul isn’t just asking them to put up with “silly old me” and his “idiosyncrasies”, though maybe it seemed like that at times. Perhaps they thought of him as a little cranky, a bit obsessive about certain things. They certainly didn’t seem to have a high view of him as a charismatic leader. Rather, we know from what he has said elsewhere to this church, especially in 1 Corinthians that God chooses what appears to be foolish and weak to humble the wise and strong. His foolishness is greater than the wisdom of the world and it is the Cross itself that is seen as foolish and offensive.
Paul’s folly is to have been a suiter but not for himself. I remember back at University in about the second week of term, one of the girls in our year group had taken a shine to the second year who led our hall small group but it wasn’t the done thing back then was it for girls to approach boys outright (times have changed) and she was a bit shy. So she asked me if I could discreetly find out if he was interested. He was and they are happily married to this day, with grown up children. If you want a more Biblical version of this, remember the story of how Abraham sent his servant off, back to Haran to find a wife for Isaac. There at a well he meets Rebekah and realises she is the one for him. Biblical apostles were ambassadors, sent as representatives for Jesus and Paul says that his task was to woo this people so that they would belong to Christ as his bride.
However, Paul is concerned that their head has been turned. There is something or somebody that seems more attractive. Someone has been paying them attention. We’ve recently got into the West Wing and there’s this kind of will they won’t they story line between the Deputy chief of staff, Josh and his assistant Donna. Well, at the end of season 5, Donna is part of a delegation to Gaza. The convoy she is in is blown up by an IED and she is badly injured. Josh flies out to sit by her hospital bed and there’s the beautiful moment when she comes round from her coma and he is sitting there. It looks like they are about to realise their love for each other. However, at that point another man turns up, a journalist who has met Donna in Gaza and swoops in with a big bouquet of flowers and a kiss for Donna. Josh has a rival.
Back in the Garden of Eden, the serpent (Satan) had shown up to as a rival to God for Adam and Eve’s affections. Paul warns the Corinthians that they are in similar danger. And I think that “affections” is the starting point. It’s not in our beliefs, what we think that we do often are in danger of going astray but what we feel, in our loves, our affections. We prioritize our identity, comfort and security and we start to look elsewhere to have those needs met. That’s when we start to give those offering a different Gospel a bit of a hearing.
You see, he says that if someone turns up preaching a different Gospel, if they experience a spirit other than the Holy Spirit, if they are introduced to a different kind of Jesus, then they happily “bear with” or put up with it. In other words, they are willing to give those bringing a false Gospel a chance, a hearing. They are ready to see what they have to offer.
Now, we don’t know what exactly the false Gospel was at Corinth, though there may be some clues as to its nature given what comes next but I don’t think that matters much. There will be different types of danger, different packaging in every generation but usually it boils down to the same thing and the next few verses will tell us how to spot those false gospels.
Often, it seems to boil down to this. First, that the big danger is not from those who seem overtly to be part of weird cults and sects. We can spot delusional people who think they are a reincarnation of Christ and those who want to draw us into weird sects a mile off. Rather, it tends to come from those who to all intents and purposes seem to be Christians. In many ways they seem to be there in the mainstream of Christian faith but watch and listen carefully and you begin to realise that something is off.
And what I’ve learnt is that instead of the focus being with laser accuracy on the truth that Jesus suffered and died to take our guilt and shame on himself so that we can be forgiven for sin, it becomes about your potential to receive and achieve. This may most overtly be seen in prosperity teaching but there are more subtle forms of it as well. At a personal level Jesus becomes the one who guarantees your every wish for a better, more successful life. The other thing that you start to spot is that the attention moves away from Jesus and what he has done and becomes about how following them, doing what they ask of you, being like them is the way to success.
This means that as well as at a personal level, we see this at work when people offer such promises of success to churches, and groups of Christians. “You are going to be the history makers, the game changers”. And of course, we see it when this kind of thinking meets politics to give us Christian Nationalism which is a form of prosperity Gospel.
All of those things look attractive. Yet Paul’s message from 2000 years ago is still relevant today. We must stay faithful to Jesus, he is the one we are promised to and he is the only one who offers true hope, lasting forgiveness and eternal life.
Stick with Gospel living (v6-15)
Remember the image that we started with of the one sent to act as a suiter on behalf of his master. Imagine if Jacob’s servant, having set eyes on Rebekah had taken a shine to her himself and sought to woo her to be his wife. I think that gives us a bit of an idea of what the false apostles were like and why the false gospels we face today are so deceptive.
Because they are being subtle, it seems that their first strategy is not to try and compare themselves with Jesus. They don’t set themselves up as other Christ’s. They claim to be his representatives, his apostles too. But they offer themselves as better or super apostles. So, they start by putting down Paul’s speaking abilities. There was a big thing about being trained in public, rhetoric or oratory and whether or not Paul had the training, he chose not to use the techniques. So the Corinthians didn’t seem to think much of his speaking abilities. That’s reassuring for preachers whenever we have an off day or our style doesn’t fit people’s preferences. Paul’s response:
“I might be an idiot or ignoramus in words (speech) but I know what really matters.”
I suspect he is being self-depreciating here but the crucial point is he knows Jesus, he knows the Holy Spirit, he knows the Gospel and those are the things that matter.
Then he asks whether he had been daft to act humbly towards them, seeking support both through working himself and from outside rather than expecting the church there to support him as he was entitled to. Note the hyperbolic language “Did I sin?” in other words
“come on, isn’t it obvious that I was doing things Jesus’ way. How can you seriously think that those who took advantage of you, who fleeced you are in the right?”
And by the way, to be clear, there is nothing wrong with a church choosing to support workers for the Gospel. That wasn’t the problem. Paul chose to forgo his rights but others demanded theirs and looked down on Paul for it. There seems to have been attempts to insinuate that Paul didn’t really love, didn’t really care for the church when it should have been obvious that the opposite was true.
But Paul insists that he is going to stick with the strategy in order to undermine the false claims of the false apostles. They claim that they operate in the same way as Paul. I think this means the very claim to be apostles. They are claiming to be the same thing but Paul shows what a real apostle is like.
On a side note here, there’s much discussion in the church today about the title/role of apostle. What most movements mean by it now is what we might refer to as “small ‘a’ apostles of the church.” These are people who have particular responsibility beyond a local church and may well have been involved in planting churches. They have a kind of “invited in” authority. Some are happy with that title others choose not to use it. Such people exist in the NT and would include people like Titus and Timothy. However, I don’t think this is the kind of “apostle” that Paul is talking about though he also had that relationship to Corinth. Rather, these people want to be like him, an apostle of Christ.
This means that our focus here is not so much on “wannabe leaders” muscling in on someone else’s territory. It is about those who offer another foundation, a different Gospel. What Paul is showing is here is that the big clues that people have gone off centre are not just about doctrine -though that matters. It’s not just about how you are saved but how you live as a result of that. This is why the prosperity stuff in all its subtle forms matters because not only does it see the problem differently, we need to be saved from poverty and failure, not only does it offer a different saviour (usually the false apostles and false teachers themselves) but it offers a different destination, a different life ahead. It’s all about successful, prosperous living now. And in the case of the false leaders, this means taking advantage from, benefiting from you, just as you are promised that you will materially benefit.
What Paul insists is that their lives and their beliefs join up. They choose dishonesty, they choose manipulation, they choose exploitation because those are the strategies of Satan and they belong to him. They serve unrighteousness not righteousness.
There are two important applications here. First, there is the warning. We should be able to spot false teachers and false apostles by observing all aspects of their lives and teaching. By the way, the first responsibility of elders in the church is to provide for and protect the flock. Elders are to ensure you are fed with healthy spiritual food and to protect you from wolves.
Secondly, there is the challenge for our own lives to. Do we have integrity? Is the evidence there that we belong to Jesus. Coming back to the true love image again. Imagine if you met someone and they were married but they lived practically a separate life from their wife or husband. Different holidays, bank accounts, separate rooms, different meal times. Imagine if they also never remembered each others birthdays. And worse still if you saw them flirty with other people all the time. You would be worried about that marriage. There would be no point them saying “but we have our marriage certificate” because how they lived would tell a different story. Do our lives tell a different story to the Gospel we claim to believe in?
Conclusion
We belong to Jesus, the true love of the Church. We should be faithful to him and that means that our lives should show it. It also means that our hearts and minds should be guarded against false gospels.
The best and safest place to be is to stick close to Christ and to the Cross.
Faithroots 