Following the Follower VIII: Treasure in Jars of Clay

Welcome to the Whole Council podcast. I'm John Snyder and with me is Chuck Baggett and we're looking again at Paul's most complete autobiographical section in the

New Testament and that is 2 Corinthians chapter 2 beginning around verse 12 through the mid part of chapter 6 and today we're picking back up with chapter 4 and verse 7.

Now we've been looking at Paul's statements regarding how he follows

Christ in the ministry and you know I feel like it's been a long time since we said this so maybe a little review.

If we're going to follow Christ as a servant whether that's in the church setting or whether that's a witness at work or you know a spiritual disciple or older Christian or in a home as a parent trying to point our young people to Christ.

We cannot follow Christ's pattern or Paul's pattern by just imitating the externals.

We want to think the way Paul thought and he explains that here in these chapters as he's going through such a difficult time in his ministry and it's just such a mine, a rich mine of gold for us spiritually.

When Paul talks in chapter 3 and he mentions the superiority of the new covenant and then in chapter 4 verse 1 he says, therefore, one of Paul's favorite words, therefore because of these facts because the new covenant is so superior to the old covenant that the glory of the new covenant outshines the old.

It's as if the old has no glory at all. Therefore, since we have this ministry, since Paul's a servant of a new covenant and as we received mercy since Paul himself has benefited from the work of Christ in the new covenant, we do not lose heart.

And there are a number of things that go along with not losing heart. But when we come to that,

Chuck and I were talking earlier, it doesn't always look like Paul's statements about the gospel and the superiority of the new covenant doesn't look like necessarily that Paul knows what he's talking about.

His boasts might appear to be empty because of two fundamental things that can be seen in his life at this time.

The first one is what we looked at last week and that is that so many in the world are rejecting the gospel and Paul's answer in verse 3 through 6 is that it's not a lack in the gospel.

It's not a weakness in the new covenant. It is the depth of man's depravity his spiritual blindness, an enemy that blinds us.

For any man, woman, or child to embrace the gospel, it does require the almighty work of God to speak, you know, to call us into the light, to open our eyes.

But in verse 7, we have the beginning of this second reason that might call into doubt these great boasts in the new covenant.

And that is the apparent obvious weakness of Paul.

And this is being seen in the midst of some very difficult circumstances.

So Chuck, when you look at verse 7 and following, you know, how would you explain to someone if you were in the

New Testament era and they came up to you and said, are you one of those Christians? And you would say, yes.

And they said, so you've been listening to this Paul fellow, yes. And they said, but look at his life.

Is that the life of a messenger of a God, the God? You know, how would you, using that passage, how would you explain what they're seeing in Paul?

Paul's answer is that there is a contrast being painted between the glory of the gospel in that new covenant and the fragility of the messenger, the pot that is being carried around in.

And so God has not put the treasure into something that's going to obscure the glory of the treasure in any way.

He's put it into this fragile bit of earthenware that highlights the glory of the gospel.

Yeah. I mean, when you were saying that, I thought about the fact that when we buy nice things, so if you're buying something, you know, jewelry for a wife for an anniversary, nice jewelry will come in a nice box.

Even not nice jewelry comes in a nice box. And so, you know, the presentation is part of it, but quite the opposite here, the extraordinary treasure of the truth that God about God and how man might know

God and have peace with God. That's been entrusted to the church. It is the most precious thing on this planet, but it is not stored in a beautiful case.

It's stored in a clay pot. And like you said, that causes the contrast between the worth of the gospel and the weakness of the messenger.

That contrast is so clear, and it highlights the strength of God, Paul says.

In verse 7, he says, but we have this treasure in earthen vessels so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves.

What Paul goes on to say in verse 8 and 9 in particular is that this weakness, this clay quality of the pot, because I think when you and I think back about Paul, we don't think of clay pot.

We think extraordinary, like the follower of Christ. If someone could ever look at our life at home or our ministry and say, you remind me of the apostle

Paul, we would think that it can't be. He's here and we're here. But the clay quality of that jar that held the treasure is demonstrated, he says, in these times of affliction.

We are afflicted in every way. So there is this just general statement about living for Christ in a world that is full of sorrow and difficulties and sometimes persecution.

We can think of misunderstanding, mistreatment. And so Paul kind of gives the whole gamut of the difficult things that he goes through by using a number of contrasts.

He uses a series of pairs of words. And the words can be, they have connotations in the original

Greek. They were used in different ways, but they kind of have, I guess we would say, common connotations for the

Greeks. So he says here in verse eight and nine, afflicted in every way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not despairing, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed.

So we have four pairs of words. If we run through them and kind of give the picture behind the words, and I'm using some other translation for my notes.

So he says, afflicted or troubled, that is the word for being in a tight spot.

I've been backed into a very tight corner here spiritually. And yet he says, we are not distressed.

We have room to maneuver. God has provided that. We are perplexed.

That is, in this tight corner, I'm doubtful at times which way to turn.

What do I do? What am I to say in this situation? Now, how would

I honor the Lord here in this difficulty? So he's perplexed, and yet God provides a clear opening direction.

He doesn't despair. He is persecuted, and the word there is pursued, like the fox is pursued by the hunter.

So I'm being hunted and pursued. And yet he says, I'm not forsaken.

That is, I have not been abandoned to the hunters, though they are hunting me.

And finally, I am cast down, a military word. I am thrown to the ground, and yet I am not destroyed, or another word for killed.

So there's been a blow landed against me by an enemy. I'm down to one knee.

I'm on a knee, and yet I am not dead. So Chuck, when you think about those metaphors and those words, how do we apply that to a normal believer's life?

Because that isn't every day, every moment Christianity.

There are times where we feel we would describe the Christian life as much more of a springtime, where it's like a sunrise, and there's a breeze from heaven.

There is happiness, and we're seeing God at work, and we're so grateful.

The Psalms, some of the Psalms are full of rejoicing, and some are brokenhearted. So there's a mixture, and this isn't every moment.

But when I read that, I might think, well, that's what an apostle went through back then, or maybe a missionary in a

Muslim country, but I'm in America. I'm in the Bible Belt. I'm a pastor, and my wife is a believer.

How do I see myself here? So how do you see the average Christian in these verses?

Well, we go through seasons of life, and so there are the spring breezes, but there are also hard times.

And a Christian hasn't been perplexed at some point and wondered, Lord, what do I do?

Or felt struck down in some moment.

So I would think it's very applicable to the believer.

The question is, what do you do when you're there? Yeah, applicable certainly to a church leader.

There are times where it seems that God is at work in the church in such a way. It's just, you feel that every

Sunday is an exciting gathering. And then there are times where it seems that things are so difficult, and you wonder, how did we get here?

What Rutherford called a raging enemy. He said, the enemy's always at work. Sometimes he's a quiet devil, and sometimes he's a raging devil.

So sometimes there is this raging enemy in the midst of Christians, and you have people against each other.

You have lies being told and fears being passed about, or just complacency.

And you can feel all those things as a church leader. But as a parent,

I mean, we were both talking about that earlier, how to point even an adult son or daughter when problems are, of course, much more serious than when they're little.

And they can be problems that have lifelong consequences, choices, bad choices now last for the rest of your life.

So it is, there are those times where you can't sleep through the night because you're crying out to the

Lord for them. And maybe it doesn't seem that the Lord is answering. What Amy Carmichael, the missionary to India, called that the age -long moment of crying out, and there seems to be no response from heaven.

And you're perplexed, or you feel struck down. Your faith feels like it's been gut -punched, and you think, does

God even know what we're going through here? And there's all those doubts presented to you that seem so reasonable this time.

And how do you not, you know, join in with that? And so it is easier to read

Paul than to follow him, but the path is a realistic path. And one thing, of course, is to remember what

Paul says here, and that is that these are things that are displaying the power of God.

And that is hard for me to remember, that going through difficult times and sometimes suffering mistreatment or being misunderstood by people, that these are things that I tend to think, well,

I would be a better Christian if this weren't happening right now. You know, I'd be a better pastor. I'd be a better dad.

And then sometimes I think, well, this is because this world is just so evil, you know, and that's why

I'm so mistreated. But I find it hard to remember what Paul is saying, and that is this is the way that God has designed for the truth of the gospel to shine above every other philosophy that was being passed around in Corinth or in America today.

And that is only one religion works, and you can see that it works when things are really bad and the weak believers are wonderfully sustained by God.

There's a verse in Philippians where Paul writes to the young church and says in chapter one, verse 29 and 30, for to you, it has been granted for Christ's sake.

So wonderful beginning of a verse. Paul says, there is a gift given to you and it's given to you for the sake of your

Lord. Okay, so what is it? Not only to believe in him, that's wonderful.

Faith is a gift, but also to suffer for his sake. Such an amazing statement that God has in that verse given you two great gifts and they are for the ultimate glory of our

King. What are they? Faith. Thank you, God. Suffering. And then we think, whoa, whoa, whoa.

No, that's the enemy's attack. It's all enemy. He kind of catches us when

God's not looking, you know, he kind of gets the upper hand, something terrible happens that breaks my heart as a

Christian that must just be all enemy. And I forget that above all of this,

Romans 8, 28, that God really is using all these things for good. And that this is the billboard that God has built for true

Christianity to shine in a land of dark religions and dark options.

But it shines best when we are going through difficult times and the power is clearly of God and not the

Christian. I find the struggle personally, you know,

I mean, you look at the life of Paul here or you read a biography like, you know, Hudson Taylor or Adeniram Judson, John Patton, these guys, and you admire them.

And you've already kind of alluded to the fact that it's easier to read Paul than to follow him and to maybe even to almost romanticize it.

And, you know, there's a temptation to kind of insert yourself into the story and think, I would do what he's doing.

But then trouble shows up in your living room, you know, and where you have perspective at looking at the life of one of these men that you admire and can see the beginning and the end and the whole thing, you know, the trouble comes and all of a sudden you tend to lose perspective and you become fixated on this issue.

And the struggle to really believe God then that he is good and that all things are for good.

And I find it is to take a moment and to take a step back so that I'm not fixated and to remember that he's the same

God right now that he was, you know, at the best moment that I felt like was the best moment. And, you know, he hasn't changed.

His purposes are still good. And if that's true, then how do

I worship him in this moment? How do I rejoice in this moment?

And how do I live in such a way that anyone looking would know that he is a good God? You know,

I don't want to respond in such a way that people think, not only am

I going through this terrible thing, but man, God sure has been bad to him. And you don't see that with Paul.

He's going through difficult times. Everyone sees he's going through difficult times, but he rejoices. Yeah, no complaints, you know, no whining.

He does call sinful behavior sinful, you know, that so -and -so, you know, you think of 2 Timothy where he is abandoned by so many that once worked alongside of him.

And he, if they have abandoned Christ or if they have sinned in doing that, he points those things out.

But there is not this constant kind of complaint of the entitled person that my home church, the

Jews, keep mistreating me when I tell them the best news I could ever tell them. Or these

Romans, and I'm a Roman citizen, these Romans are keep mistreating me, you know, and all of that was wicked.

You know, the response of the unbelieving Jews, the violence, the lies they told about him, and the response later of Rome, all of that was ungodly.

And God would deal with those people, but Paul doesn't waste any

New Testament verses whining, you know. It made me think of when

I was reading this, an illustration that Samuel Rutherford gave, and he gave it, I believe, from prison.

He was put into prison in the early, mid -1600s for preaching in a way that offended the monarchy.

So in Scotland, he's in prison, and he's writing back to church members, and he uses the illustration of ships that are sailing, so back then sailing ships.

And he said, any old ship, leaky, you know, not really seaworthy, any ship looks like it's going along great when the breeze is in the sails, and it's a beautiful day.

And you look at all these ships, and you think, as they pass by quickly, wow, you know, they're all good ships, they're all sound.

But he said, let a storm come, and the ships that are not sound, suddenly you spot them because they start to be the ones that are sinking, you know.

It's one thing for Paul to come into town and say, I bring you good news of the living

God, a God that made you, a God that you've lived in front of His face all your life, that your parents and grandparents did, but a

God that you've rejected as pagans, and I'm bringing you the good news across the Roman Empire.

And you think, well, another religion, hmm, what does this guy have to say? You know, this is the 20th one this year, and Paul goes through these storms in front of the people, and he, you know, his soul prospers, even if it's with a broken heart.

He is happy to do it for love of Christ and the people, whereas when other religions are taken through a difficult time, you know, then it begins to sink.

So, it's not what we would choose, but it is a perfect way of displaying the truth of God in a world that is crammed full of other options.

I was reading through some of the quotes that I had written down through the years as I'm reading biographies, you know,

I try to, I underline in all my books, and I try to sometimes get one notebook where I put my favorite quotes.

And so, I have a couple that apply to this. One was John Newton. So, early 1800s, late 1700s,

Newton said this, he said, his prayer as a pastor was that I may speak as I ought and live as I speak, you know, so even in the difficult times that people could see the reality of his life.

Another, Hudson Taylor, a friend at the end of his life, wrote and described decades of working, you know, next to Hudson Taylor, living with Hudson Taylor for years, working beside him in China through the worst of times and the best of times.

And he said, there was a life that bore looking into. Amy Carmichael wrote a prayer for her and the other missionaries she worked with, make us to be what we appear, make us to stand to our conscience clear.

So, wanting by the grace of God, the work of the

Lord in us to be so clearly real that even when these sufferings come, that Paul mentions, what people see is a weak saint held by an almighty

God. And by that great work of God, we are what we say we are.

We are children of God. Well, he talks about the result of that in verse 12, and that is death works in us, but life in you.

And that kind of sums it all up. This is the billboard for the glory, for the display of God's power, your weakness in a world that will take advantage of weakness.

And this is the channel, this is the path through which life comes to the people you serve in your home, at work, at school, in the church.

You die, death is working in you, life is working in them.

So Chuck, how does that, how would you explain that for an everyday

Christian, death working in them, life in someone else? I think of the death as a dying to, you know, how my flesh might want to respond to the suffering and choosing to obey

God or dying to, you know, maybe what you thought life would look like, and here

God has given this to you. So I'm sure there are other things as well, but dying to myself in those ways.

Yeah, I think that's really helpful in the context here. So it's not just, it is dying to self daily,

I think, that's included in that. Of course, Paul did face physical threat of death often, and that may be the condition of Christians today at times, and especially in different places, but I think that that that you mentioned is so important that in the midst of the suffering itself,

I will be presented with a very attractive lie. I deserve to be treated better.

You know, I have loved my children, and when they became adults, and I raised them, and I pointed them to Christ, and now that they're adults, they have kind of, they've walked away from Christ, and when

I still pray for them, and plead with them, and look for openings to say a word about Christ to them, even though I know that they're really not wanting to hear another word about Christ, so I want to be careful and wise, and when

I do it, I get this, you know, angry response, this negative response, and you think, hey,

I deserve better here. Well, humanly speaking, maybe, but can you die to your rights?

You mentioned plans. Can you die to your thought of what life might be? You know, you and Elizabeth, your wife, have adopted two boys, and your kids had just grown up, gone to college, and moved out, and then two little boys come in, and so you could look at each other, you know, in your 50s, and say, we didn't think we would be chasing, you know, 10 -year -olds around the yard at this age.

We thought, well, we had to say that we've never said that. Yeah, we had ideas, you know, and so, but for life to come to those boys, you and Elizabeth daily have to wake up and say, well, we lay those plans in the dust before our

King. That may not be what He planned. So, in the present moment, what would honor

Him? How do I live upon the fullness of Christ, even with the difficulties of little boys, or in a church, or in a marriage when you're married to a lost person, you know, or in a hard workplace where you're the only

Christian? Can you, in that moment, can you lay in the dirt your rights?

Can you die to those comforts that you feel you deserve, that respect, so that life, so that the reality of Christ can flow through your words, and by the grace of God, some will be brought to life?

Yeah, and it's such a temptation, I think, especially in that one, the job place. You know, the answer is a new job.

Obviously, I'm not supposed to be here, and maybe you're not supposed to be there, but that's not automatically the answer.

Can you live for God in hard circumstances in a job that is just difficult?

Yeah, I often think, you know, because as pastors, we do get talked to a lot, especially by men, in jobs with our culture kind of, you know, spiraling downward morally.

The workplace can become quite aggressive in demanding compliance with new morality.

So we often have men that'll come to us and say, I don't know how long I can work here.

You know, I get mistreated, and some of it is conscience sake, you know, and that's a good question. If I stay here, will

I be sinning against the Lord? But some of it is difficulty, and I think when it comes to difficulty, the answer is pretty clear.

You know, what he says in chapter 4, why not see that as God dropping an enormous movie screen behind your life, and every mistreatment, misunderstanding that you suffer because you love

Christ, it is a screen to show how wonderful and real and powerful the

God behind the gospel is. I just ask them, I say, well, how much would we as a church be willing to pay a missionary to go into some foreign country into a very wicked work environment and to put a

Christian there? Like, well, we might pay 40 ,000 a year for a missionary to be there, but you're there.

It just happens to be, you know, a 20 -minute drive and not across the world, but it's the same thing. You know, how much would we give to put a real

Christian in a very ungodly school in China? Well, why not

Mississippi? You know, so difficulty, I think, is rarely a reason to move on.

But pastors, for a while, I think the average stay for a pastor was 20 months, and I don't know if it's worse or better than that now.

And I don't mean that a pastor has to stay forever. I mean, I think we would kind of like to stay here forever, but that's the

Lord's choice. But how many men have said, I had to leave that place because they mistreated me, or they mistreated my family?

Or like, well, but that's 2 Corinthians 4, you know, and we and our spouse and our kids, for the glory of Christ, sometimes

He gives us the gift of suffering for His sake. And if you ever listen to John Piper's sketches, those historical sketches,

Charles Simeon, it just blows me away. I mean, I like Simeon. I've read

Simeon. I've read his sermon sketches. But when I listened to Piper summarize that life and the over a decade of persecution by the church members, it is astonishing that he didn't pack up and move because there were so many offers.

So I guess we could close by asking this question. In light of what Christ said in John chapter 12, that unless a corn of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it does not bear any fruit.

There's no harvest that comes from a piece of corn or a piece of a grain of wheat that is kept in a little glass box.

But if we let it go into the earth, die, germinate, then a great harvest comes. So Christ is mentioning

His own death and how that would produce what God intended it to produce in the kingdom. But that's the basic pattern for us, that we must, like Paul, be willing to die daily to things that maybe we have a right to.

But we gladly lay aside those rights for a time for the sake of the witness of the gospel and for what we're saying about Christ to have weight.

But my question to close with is, are we wanting to see

God honored in America where we're becoming quickly a multicultural, multi -religious society?

Are we wanting to see Jesus of Nazareth exalted and the truth about Him set apart from all the false religions that are now coming in?

And are we wanting to see that happen through us saying the right biblical words?

I am saying what God would want me to say here, but divorcing it from the means which

God has chosen throughout the centuries. Your weakness on display in times of hardship, being a billboard of the power of God and being a channel of life through which the message is carried to others.

It's a very different approach than perhaps what we might've thought at some point in our life.

Well, we'll close there with verse 12, and next week we're going to pick up with verse 9 of chapter 5, which is connected with the closing verses of chapter 4 and those first eight verses where Paul sees the eternal realities and it creates in him an ambition.