Sunday Sermon: Let the One Who Boasts Boast in the Lord (2 Corinthians 10:13-18)

You are listening to the teaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast, we feature 20 minutes of Bible study through a New Testament book.

On Thursday is our Old Testament study, and then we answer questions from listeners on Friday. Each Sunday we are pleased to share our sermon series, presently going through the letters to the Corinthians.

This is the sermon that was preached last week from our pulpit. Here's Pastor Gabe.

Boasting Only in the Lord from 2 Corinthians 10:13-18

2 Corinthians chapter 10, verses 13 through 18. The apostle Paul writes, but we will not boast beyond limits, but we'll boast only with regard to the area of influence God assigned to us to reach even to you.

For we are not overextending ourselves as though we did not reach you, for we were the first to come all the way to you with the gospel of Christ. We do not boast beyond limit in the labors of others, but our hope is that as your faith increases, our area of influence among you may be greatly enlarged so that we may preach the gospel in lands beyond you without boasting of work already done in another's area of influence.

Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord, for it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends. Let's pray. Our wonderful and sovereign God, we thank you for your word this morning that teaches us and guides us in every aspect and area of our lives.

And so may we come to recognize from this word this morning that it is to you belongs all glory and to no other. All glory be to Christ our King, in whose name we pray and all God's people said, amen.

Thank you. You may be seated. I had a conversation with a fellow minister not long ago. We were sitting at Starbucks here in town, and if you ever catch me over there at Starbucks, you know I'm there because of the person I'm with, not for myself.

Yeah, Sonia's shaking her head. He doesn't drink coffee. That's me. I don't drink coffee. I might have a hot chocolate or something like that, but I don't drink coffee. So that was the place we decided to meet.

We were sitting and talking, and one of the things that he said to me was, well, you're a Calvinist church. And I said, no, we do not have any kind of Calvinist statement of faith. It's the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 that we have as our statement of faith, just like you have at your church.

He was also a fellow Baptist. And he said, well, last year you were teaching on the five solas of the Protestant Reformation. I know that's what you were going through in your church in October of last year.

And I said, right. We did that not because we're Calvinist, it's because we're Protestant. This is the doctrines that all Protestant churches should adhere to. It is that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, and our authority in all of this is Scripture alone, God's Word.

These five doctrines made up the cherished doctrines of the Protestant Reformation that these Protestant Reformers clung to and desired to rescue from the Roman Catholic Church that all people would know that we're saved in Christ Jesus and by no other.

And this is testified to us in the Scriptures, which has been given to every man, the Word of God, that all may hold it and read it in their hands. And as I was explaining this to this man, with a little less passion than I just did, but as I was explaining this to this gentleman, he said, well, I'm not Protestant.

And I said, you're Southern Baptist. And he said, yeah, you know, it's just, I'm just Baptist. I'm not a Protestant. And I didn't have a good response to him at the time when he said that. I knew that he was a little bit ecumenical.

He had part of his family was Roman Catholic. That may have been the reason why he refused to acknowledge himself as Protestant. But if I could go back and have that conversation again, my response would probably go something like this.

Very respectfully, I have to say to you, that's a very ignorant response. We all kind of like to think that we're above it all. It's like this thing that happened with this man and this guy's name is attached to that and went, yeah, okay.

Church history, whatnot, that's not what I believe. That's not where I came from. I'm just a Christian. I just believe what the Bible says. And we like to think that creeds and confessions and those things, that's what other people do.

But I don't need that. I just have the Bible. Friends, there's a lot of false teachers that say that. I just believe the Bible. I just believe Jesus. The Mormons just believe Jesus. The Jehovah's Witnesses just believe the Bible, which they've changed and altered into the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures.

But it's through these creeds and confessions that we come to understand what we believe about the Bible. The Bible's a big book. It's 775 ,000 words, for those of you who are keeping count. Narrowing it down to specific beliefs that we all agree the Bible says is not the doctrines of man.

It's coming to agreement as fallible human beings that are prone to forget, that can't grab 700-plus-something-thousand words into our mind and try to make sense of it. And we try to summarize those doctrines in ways that are easily understandable, that we might communicate the gospel to others in ways that they can understand it.

That's why we do these things. So we remember the Protestant Reformers, not because we're trying to make a religion that's after their name. We're all under one name, and that is Christ Jesus. But you understand that the Christians that went before us were fighting for the same thing that we are fighting for now.

And all of us are being sanctified together. Now, they're dead and gone. You're like, how could they still be sanctified when they're dead and they are no more? Well, the book of Hebrews tells us in Hebrews chapter 11 that those faithful who have gone before us are even being made sanctified now as the number of Christ's elect are being added to day by day.

So that body is growing who is going to stand before the throne of God forever and proclaim His righteousness and His holiness. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and who is and who is to come.

And every person who comes to faith is one more number that's added to that multitude that will be proclaiming the glory of God in heaven forever. And so we shouldn't turn a blind eye to the things that our Christian brothers and sisters in the past have done so that we might have this word that we can proclaim.

How arrogant would it be of us to say, well, I don't need all of that. I have my Bible and I just believe what the Bible says. Right. You have your Bible because of the sacrifice of men like William Tyndale who gave his life that we might be able to read the Bible in English.

And there are missionaries in the world to this day who give their lives so the Bible can be translated in the language of someone else that they also might read and rejoice in the salvation that is given to us in Jesus Christ.

All of us like to boast in our labels. We do that sometimes. I think the very fact that we have Baptist on the sign out front is in a sense of boast. We're Baptist. We're not Presbyterian. We're not Methodist.

We're Baptist. Okay. We all like to boast in our labels and who we follow and who came up with this and our doctrines and eschatology and all this other kind of thing. But when it comes down to it, we are all unified in one name, all those who call upon that name, and that is Jesus Christ our Lord.

So let us not boast in anything but that, that it is the name Jesus that is above all other names and at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father, Philippians 2 .11.

Paul’s Area of Influence and the Coming Rebuke of the False Apostles

Here, the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 10 talks about boasting. But he's saying that we cannot boast in ourselves. We boast in Christ. Now that first verse there, verse 13, you'll notice he says, we will not boast beyond limits.

Now the reason why Paul says that is because he's setting the stage here for what he's going to present in chapter 11. And we're going to get into chapter 11 starting next week. It's a pretty heavy chapter as Paul contends for the hearts of the Corinthians who are being led astray by false teachers.

They're being led astray by men who claim that they have a better gospel than Paul's and they're better apostles than Paul is. In our first letter, the first letter that we have in canon that was written to the Corinthians and 1 Corinthians, Paul rebukes them for their sin and calls them to repentance.

And we see in this letter that many of them did indeed repent, but there are still many Corinthians who are not convinced that Paul is a genuine apostle of God. They still think these other guys are real apostles because they're flashier, they speak better, they wrote books called Your Best Life Now.

You know, they think they're the better apostles and Paul is just kind of some hobo off the way. Where in the world did he come from? What makes him great? He can't even speak as good as these guys. We had that in verse 10.

His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak and his speech is of no account. The Greeks wanted great orators. They wanted flashy guys. They wanted those booming voices and were led to believe that Apollos had one of those kinds of voices because that was who the Corinthians liked.

Hey, send us Apollos, we'll listen to him. But Paul was kind of weak of stature. He wasn't as impressive. And so the Corinthians weren't convinced that he was as authentic as these other guys who sound better and look nicer.

So Paul finds it necessary to have to boast in himself, to contend for the hearts of the Corinthians, to verify that he is indeed an apostle of Jesus Christ. That's what we're going to get to next week when we get into chapter 11.

So he's setting the stage for that, but he says as a precursor to that, we will not boast beyond limits, but will boast only with regard to the area of influence God assigned to us to reach even to you.

Now what was the area of influence that God had assigned to Paul? Well, we read about that in Acts chapter 9. When Paul, who at the time was called Saul, was blinded on the road to Damascus and was told to stay in a house and a man was going to come to him, and that man was Ananias.

And Saul was persecuting Christians. Jesus appeared to him and said, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? There were friends that were with him that heard the voice of God booming from heaven and Saul, who was stricken blind, he was led by his friends to that house he was told to go to.

God appeared to Ananias and told him of Saul and that you're going to go and you're going to baptize him. And Ananias was resistant to this. He said, I've heard of this guy. I know he's been out there persecuting Christians.

And God said to Ananias, he is going to be my witness to the nations, to the Gentiles, and I am going to show him how much he is going to suffer for my name. Remember that, Dave? You've talked through that chapter already.

So Paul was going to be assigned to share the gospel and he was going to be told, you're going to suffer for it. So when Paul says, we're not going to boast beyond our limits, what he's about to go into when he boasts about himself and qualifies himself as an apostle before these Corinthians, is he's going to boast about all the ways in which he has suffered for the gospel.

And these super guys barely have had a hangnail compared to what it is that they've done. That Paul's been through. So we're only going to boast in regard to the area of influence that God has assigned to us to reach even to you.

How many of you have ever put a resume together before? Have you ever done a resume? Most of you probably done a resume. How many of you have inflated your credentials on your resume, raise your hand.

I have, that's right. Finding the right wording. Okay, that's a good way to put it. We try to make ourselves sound a little bit better than we really are just to impress them. And who are the references that you put on your resume?

Only the people that you know will say the best things about you, right? But the apostle Paul is saying here that he is only going to boast about those things that are accurate. He's not going to inflate his resume.

He's not going to call attention to references that are only the best. As a matter of fact, this is a pretty pitiful resume by earthly standards when you get into it. This guy who has been an apostle of Jesus Christ and he's gone through the things that he's gone through, can we really say that the Lord is with him?

But we suffer that we may be made like Christ and all of us are supposed to go through some amount of suffering. For this is how we are sanctified. Philippians 1 29, for it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ, you should not only believe in him, but also suffer for his sake.

It's why James said at the start of James, his letter, James chapter one, he said, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you. But rejoice, give praise to God. And may the sufferings and struggles and things like that that we go through in this life remind us that there is an imperishable kingdom that has been promised to us for all who are in Christ.

That this world is not our final resting place and we will be delivered from that, from anything that we are going through now, whatever that thing might be. It might be a temptation in your flesh that you just have the worst time trying to conquer will I ever not have this temptation anymore?

James says in James chapter four, draw near to God and resist the devil and he will flee from you. So we need to draw near to the Lord. The devil will flee from us, but we still have to endure when we have that temptation.

We still have to have a mind that takes every thought captive. Remember what we read last week in 2 Corinthians 10 5, we destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience.

So we must take those thoughts captive as we have been commanded to do. You may still struggle with that temptation for as long as you are in this life, but you will have deliverance from it on the day of glory.

Perhaps you struggle with some sort of physiological ailment, whether that be depression or PTSD or a certain anxiety that you cannot conquer. Maybe you're just a slow witted person by most standards.

You don't remember or recall things as well as most people do. If somebody were to take your IQ, it would be on the low scale and you feel underprivileged because of that. Endure, give glory to God, even in the midst of this trial and tribulation.

Perhaps there is an ailment in your body, a physical disability that you struggle with that causes you pain daily, yet continue to rejoice in God, knowing this, that a day is coming in which Christ is going to transform our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body by the power that enables Him to subject all things to Himself.

Praise be to God. You know, just this past week, I discovered something that I was not aware that this was the problem, but praise be to God, it has been resolved for me. I have had the worst problems in my knees this year than I have ever had.

Standing up here and preaching, I'll walk out from the pulpit and my knees will just be burning. Now, I stand still for the most part, you see me jostle around and whatnot, but I'm kind of standing in one spot and I don't notice the pain until I'm done and I'm walking down.

And this has been going on for about the last seven or eight months or so. Well, my shoes have worn out, finally. This past Friday, I had gone to JCPenney to grab some shoes. I was on my way to preach at a church over in Wamego on Friday evening.

So I stopped by JCPenney to grab some shoes because my shoes were so worn out, they didn't look good with my pants anymore. So I went and got some new shoes, put them on, went to the church, preached, and when I walked down off of the pulpit, I was thinking to myself, wow, my knees feel really good.

I realized the knee problems that I've had for the last eight months were because of my shoes. But yet I was still praising God even though I would preach in the midst of knee problems because I know that though I feel this ache in my knees right now, God is going to deliver me from this pain.

Praise be to the Lord. He delivered me from it before the return of Christ. Nevertheless, my body is still wasting away even as I stand here before you. Yours is wasting away as you sit there in your chair.

All of this world has been subjected to futility because of our sin. You might have looked at the news this past week and thought, why does God allow such evil atrocities and injustices to happen in this world?

And it's because of sin. It's because of us that evil happens. But as we sang about this morning and as also said multiple times through the prophet Isaiah, God is making all things new and he is bringing everything into reconciliation through Jesus Christ.

All of creation is being reconciled to God the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ. So as we realize in our bodies and as our bodies remind us on a daily basis that nothing lasts forever but your faith and trust in Christ and you will live forever.

The Gospel in Corinth and the Danger of Prosperity Teaching

Paul goes on to say in verse 14, we are not overextending ourselves as though we did not reach you for we were the first to come all the way to you with the gospel of Christ. There's quite a story in Acts as to how Paul ended up there in Corinth instead of the place that he wanted to go.

The Holy Spirit of God took him to Corinth that he might proclaim the gospel. And when the Jews in the synagogue would not receive the gospel that the Apostle Paul proclaimed, he shook his garment and said, your blood be on your own heads, releasing himself of them.

And he said, from now on I go to the Gentiles. And so Paul went out into the city and he proclaimed, but then the Gentiles began to persecute Paul. Yet the Spirit of God spoke to the Apostle Paul and said to him, remain where you are for I have many faithful here in this city.

And though there was persecution that was going on around him yet Paul did not, he was not harmed while he was there. So for 18 months he remained there in Corinth preaching the gospel and growing them in the knowledge of God.

We were the first to come all the way to you with the gospel of Christ. We do not boast beyond limit in the labors of others. That's verse 15. Now who are the others that Paul is talking about? Well, he's actually referring to the super apostles whom he's about to rebuke coming up here in chapter 11.

That's the labors of others that he's referring to. And he's saying this very sarcastically because when it comes down to it, they're not really laboring at all. They're doing what they do for financial gain, to become famous, to become wealthy.

They're capitalizing on the popularity of the gospel that Paul has been preaching and the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and trying to capitalize on it for themselves, that they might be able to gain a little bit of something from it.

We don't have that problem in our world today though, right? Nobody's trying to capitalize on Christianity and get wealthy and popular from it. Becky and I actually just had the privilege this past week of watching a documentary called American Gospel, Christ Alone.

And the whole point of the documentary, which is two hours and 20 minutes long, but still a wonderful documentary, the whole point of the documentary is to raise awareness of America's leading theological export.

And that is the health and wealth gospel, or what's also called the prosperity gospel. And we talked about that here in this service just a few weeks ago when I played clips for you of various health and wealth teachers and the thing that they proclaim that is actually not the gospel.

And I tell you, my friends, they will quote lots of scripture. They quote lots and lots of scripture. So lest your metric is, well, if they quote the Bible, then they're of Christ. But if they're not quoting the Bible, well, they may not actually be a right teacher.

If that is your measure, you must know the word of God more soundly and test what they say according to what the Bible actually says, because they use it quite a bit, but they misuse it. They take it out of context, they preach it falsely, they speak these things in vain.

And many people are led astray by this because the prosperity gospel promises people earthly prosperity. You will be healthy. Do this and you will be wealthy. And yet we know the gospel does not promise us any such thing, caveat, on this side of heaven.

The gospel does promise us that we will be healthy and we will be wealthy beyond measure or imagination, but in heaven in glory with Christ, not here while we dwell in this material world. Now, let me also add to that by saying that our desire should not be for those things, whether we long for them on earth or we long for them in heaven.

The reason why we're Christians is not because we're going to get a mansion in glory. In fact, I might even burst your bubble by saying that that passage in John is rightly understood that in my Father's house there are many rooms, not many mansions.

So hopefully that... But R .C. Sproul has clarified that and say many suites. So if you still need a little bit more than just rooms, there you go. It's going to be a pretty handsome place to live. Our desire should not be for that.

Our desire first and foremost in our hearts, my friends, should be for God. We desire God above all else. And then he will pour out these blessings upon us. But that's not why we worship God. We worship God for His glory.

We worship Him because we know that He and He alone is worthy of our worship. No one else or nothing else deserves glory and honor but God. And so we worship Him because He's holy, because we know He is the perfect, righteous creator who brought all things into existence by the speaking of a word.

And if He has such command over the existence or the non-existence of things just by speaking it into existence or speaking it out of existence, then we know that He governs everything, including our hearts, that we might lift our hearts up to Him in praise and worship Him because we know that He is worthy of it.

He is deserving of worship. Have you ever asked yourself the question, why worship God? When I was speaking at Trinity Baptist in Wamego this past Friday, that was kind of one of the ways that I turned my message into asking questions about your faith that you probably don't ordinarily ask.

Maybe because you were raised in it or maybe because you've just been doing it for so long that you've forgotten what this is all for. You're going through the motions now, but you're not really thinking about what we as Christians have been called to do, to worship God.

And why? Why worship God? Because He told you to. That's why you worship God. I told the congregation there that I grew up in church. From the very first Sunday that I was breathing in this world, my mom and dad had me in church.

And from that point on, there was no getting out of going to church. You go to church every Sunday morning, we go to church on Sunday evening. We go to church on Wednesday night. If there's some other special activity that's going on at the church during the week, we're going then as well.

If there was some sort of weekend conference, like what was going on at the church in Wamego and it was Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, well, we were going to be there all three days for the conference.

If the doors were open, we were there. I couldn't say to my dad, hey, dad, I'm sick today. I don't think I can go to church. You're fine. Let's go. Dad, I think I'm going to throw up. Well, throw up and prove it.

And then if you did throw up, he would say, there, don't you feel better? Now let's go to church. There was no getting out of going to church for me. So I had grown up in it. And I had not been asking some of those questions about why we worship God or what does it mean to call Jesus Christ as Savior.

I was just going through the motions of it. And I hit a crisis of conscience in my teenage years of wondering whether I truly believed this because it was true or whether I believed it just because my parents believed it.

And praise be to God and His grace upon my life that in that moment of testing, I came to realize I believe this because it's true, not just because my parents told me to believe it and that my boasting would not be in myself, but would be in Christ.

Now granted, I didn't fully understand that even when I came to understand that the Bible is true and everything that it claims is without error. Though I may have come to that understanding, there was still a lot of myself in the way that needed to get out of the way before God could do that work of sanctification in my heart.

So it's been a long journey and it continues to be a long journey. Amen to those of you 70 and above. You are a testimony to me that I still have a long way to go, but may our boasting not be in ourselves, but in Christ.

So remember again those five solas of the Protestant Reformation, those five key doctrines that we often remember this time of year when we consider the Protestant Reformation. The chief among them, well, they're all kind of equal, but kind of the one that sits above all the other five is soli deo gloria, glory be to God alone.

Who else should glory belong to? And when we don't glory in God, where does our glory go? That's right, it goes to ourselves. That's really the only other thing that we glorify. We either glorify God or we glorify ourselves.

Whatever else that you believe that would be contrary to the knowledge of God, again verse five, we destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. Whatever it is that has your attention, that has your heart, that is contrary to the knowledge of God, whatever it seems to be that you would worship, either apart from God or in addition to God, when it comes down to it, it's about the glorification of yourself.

Even the pagan nations, when they worshiped false gods, they worshiped those false gods for the betterment of themselves. Like I'm worshiping the God of the sea so that my investment on this ship that is carrying my cargo would be protected, right?

I'm going to worship the fertility God so that I would have great crops and I would have a beautiful, wonderful family. So whatever false god that was worshiped was ultimately for the glorification of the self.

When we don't glorify God, we glorify ourselves. And this gives weight to the word of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians who says, I have been crucified with Christ, and it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.

And the glory that we give to God is because we've crucified the self and exalted Christ in our hearts as holy, knowing that we're not righteous. The scriptures show us that we are sinners in need of a Savior, and Christ is that Savior.

And when we call Him Savior, what is it that He has saved us from? This is a question that I've asked of my children, that they may learn this young, and when the day comes that they make the decision to follow Christ, they'll remember what their Father has taught them.

What has Jesus saved us from? My children can answer this question for you. He has saved us from sin. He has saved us from death, which is the wages of sin, and He has saved us from Himself. What does that mean?

Means what John 3 .36 says it means, that all who have the Son have life, but he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains upon him. In Romans 2, we read that the wrath of God is burning against all the unrighteousness of men, and a day is coming in which He will judge the world in all their unrighteous deeds.

And when we call upon Christ as Savior, we understand that Christ has saved us even from Himself. That we would be saved from the wrath of God, delivered from His wrath into His love. And we're no longer a child of wrath, as we once were, as is described in Ephesians 2, verses 1 -3, we're no longer a child of wrath like the rest of mankind, but we have become a child of God.

You all know the golden chain of redemption that is in Romans 8 .29, right? For those whom God has predestined, He has also sanctified. Let's look at that together. Let's go to Romans 8, and stay there in Romans, there's another passage I want to show to you there.

Romans 8, that's praises to God back there, is what that is. Romans 8, verse 29, let's look at 28 and 29, I've already quoted 28 already. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose.

For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom He predestined, He also called. And those whom He called, He also justified.

And those whom He justified, He also glorified. Now that's what we refer to as the golden chain of redemption, because it's the process of salvation that we see there. God is predestined, He is called, and then those whom He called, He has justified, and we've received that justification by faith in Jesus Christ.

That's the heart of the gospel that was fought for in the Protestant Reformation. And those whom He justified, He also glorified. And we are going to be with Him in glory someday. But you understand that even now, as you have been rescued from the kingdom of this world and transferred to the kingdom of His light, as Peter talked about, that you've been glorified even now?

As Paul says in Colossians chapter 3, if then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is, seated with Christ in God in glory. You are seated with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.

So we have a place in the heavens, though we have not yet reached that final glorification. There is a glory that we have been given in Christ because we have His Spirit dwelling within us. So this is that golden chain of salvation as it is referred to.

But I want to say, even though it's wonderfully summarized in this passage, in these passages, Romans 8, 28 through 30, great passage to have underlined in your Bible. Even though it's summarized in these three verses, that's not the totality of our salvation.

There's another process in that salvation that Paul has mentioned in this chapter. It just doesn't appear in the sequence that he's given there in verses 28 through 30. What is the other part of that salvation that is mentioned in 8, but not included in those verses?

Well, it's all the way back in verse 15. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of, what's that word, adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba, Father.

We have been adopted into the family of God. We are justified and then we are adopted. We were previously sons and daughters of wrath, followers of Satan, according to Jesus in John chapter 8. You are not of your father, Abraham, you're of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires.

But when we come to Christ, we've been transferred from that kingdom of darkness into his kingdom of light, and we're no longer of the family of Satan, we're of the family of God. Adopted as sons and daughters of God.

Jesus saying to his disciples, I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you. So as we have not been left to a spirit of corruption, but we have been given a spirit of adoption so that we may cry to the Lord, Abba, Father, and glorify his name.

Look at Romans chapter 11, beginning in verse 33, and we'll come back to 2 Corinthians 10 and close. Romans chapter 11, beginning in verse 33, Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways.