Paul's Loving Plea

I. Introduction
A. We are a part of a church in order to grow in Christ, not be static in our faith, not just maintain.
1. And that happens a number of ways: by example, by encouragement, by prayer. But especially it happens by the word of God.
2. We have been blessed by this glorious resource to help us see God and know how to respond.
B. 2Corinthians is Paul’s most personal and most relational epistle. There is no better resource to gain insight into how to deal with the mess which inevitably comes when sinners strive to develop closeness with one another.
C. 2Corinthians 7:2–4 Make room in your hearts for us. We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have taken advantage of no one. 3 I do not say this to condemn you, for I said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together. 4 I am acting with great boldness toward you; I have great pride in you; I am filled with comfort. In all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy.
II. Paul’s response to false charges (7:2-4)
A. One commentator (Paul Barnett) says, "Historically, few ministers can have suffered at the hands of their congregations as much as Paul had from the behavior of the Corinthians."
B. And yet amazingly, Paul doesn’t write them off. They’ve abused him, they’ve accused him – even though he’d always treated them lovingly. But he doesn’t write them off. He keeps his heart open to them. “I said before that you are in our hearts.” (He’s already told them that his heart is open to them in 6:11)
C. And he begs them to keep their hearts open to him as well: “Make room in your hearts for us.”
1. Let us back in to your hearts, don’t keep pushing us off, let’s be close again. Their hearts had become closed to Paul. Now he’s trying to open them back up.
D. Paul was their main source of spiritual truth. And we see here how the enemy of our souls will attempt to separate us from our sources of spiritual life so that we shrivel up and die. It might be a church, it might be the Bible, an older brother or sister in Christ, a leader, a parent, a friend, a husband, a wife. It may not be something we are even aware of.
1. Our enemy will do anything to distance us from Christ.
III. Paul’s self-defense (7:2)
A. Paul then goes on to defend himself: "Make room in your hearts for us. We wronged no one, we corrupted no one, we took advantage of no one." In other words, there is no reason for you to close yourselves off from us, for we never did anything to harm you.
B. There are a few things to see here:
1. There are many people who don’t believe in love, who don’t believe in the possibility of good motives. They believe that everyone – even God if He exists – is out for self. It doesn’t matter how altruistic a person seems to be, they feel that down deep they are just putting on a show for the sake of their own advantage. They frequently accuse those – like Paul – who claim to higher motives and sincere love of putting on a show and disguising their true selfish motives.
a. Sometimes this kind of people have been abused and that experience has fueled their belief that there’s no one who really loves them.
b. And sometimes this kind of people have not been abused and have concluded that there is no true love because it gives them permission to do whatever they want, it gives them a justification for their selfish lifestyle.
c. But either way, their eyes have not been opened to see the lovingkindness of God. They haven’t come to see that the universe is ruled by a benevolent God, who has good purposes for all He does.
2. The Judaizers in Corinth who accused Paul were blind to who God was — just as Paul himself had once been blind.
a. They did not attack Paul in spite of how Christ-like he was. They attacked Paul BECAUSE of how godly he was. Jesus promised it: just as they hated Him, so they will hate His followers (John 15:18-20).
b. We can’t view what they did without seeing the spiritual battle here. Take finger prints on this crime scene: they belong to Satan.
3. Paul was falsely accused. We also might be falsely accused.
a. It is very possible for people to falsely judge others, to attribute to them ulterior motives when, in reality, they are just trying to love them.
4. And when we are falsely accused, God has given us in Paul an example of how to respond.
a. Instead of becoming offended by these charges, and instead of retaliating in kind, Paul pleads innocent to the charges they have against him. "We wronged no one, we corrupted no one, we took advantage of no one."
5. But notice that he does not say, “I never hurt you.” He did hurt them – deeply. And it was easy for them to feel mistreated because it hurt so much. But he hurt them in love – for their good. The Lord disciplines those whom He loves (Heb.12:6). And sometimes we must do the same.
IV. Seasoned speech (7:3)
A. Now lets talk a little about v.3 "I do not say this to condemn you, for I said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together."
B. Remember that this letter followed another letter of Paul, a letter that we refer to as his severe letter (2Cor.2:3-4). And we call it his severe letter because he makes it clear that he spoke to them very severely: in it he rebuked them, he corrected them, he reproved them.
C. Paul knew he had already caused them a lot of pain, and as he is writing this letter he is clearly reluctant to cause them any more (2Cor.2:1-2). But he’s got some more things to say, some more things they need to hear. And so he’s walking on eggshells.
D. And he is ever so careful about how he says what he needs to say. He is very careful to craft the things he says in a very obviously loving way.
E. He is fulfilling his own instructions found in Colossians 4:6 “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.” and in his final letter, 2Timothy 2:24-25 “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.”
F. So, after Paul’s defense in 7:2b, he quickly adds this; "I do not say this to condemn you, for I said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together."
G. Though he is saying that he is innocent of the accusations they have believed, he wants them to know that in saying that he is not trying to condemn them or attack them. In saying that the things they were told weren’t true, he wanted them to know that he wasn’t offended and he wasn’t holding a grudge against them for it. He loved them too much for that. In spite of the fact that they had forsaken Paul – albeit temporarily – HE IS NOT WANTING TO SHAME THEM.
H. You see, when you really love someone, that love covers a multitude of sins (1Pet.4:8). When you really love someone, your love enables you to put up with their shortcomings.
I. And Paul really loves these Corinthians. And so he does not attack them or condemn them, though that would have been the natural human response. And he wants it to be clear to them that he’s not doing that.
J. Being quick to condemn or quick to attack, being quick to anger or even to get irritated and have an edge in your voice, to speak to someone with the slight odor of disdain in your voice, all this flows from a lack of love. Those who love a lot are slow to anger and quick to forgive. Those who love little make a habit of condemning and attacking and getting irritated, whether outwardly or just inwardly.
K. Now, the issue here was not the Corinthians’ sin. They had sinned plenty for Paul to justify being angry. But being angry in this situation wasn’t going to help them. Their faith in Christ was hanging in the balance, and an apostolic temper tantrum could easily have put them over the edge.
L. He could have blamed them if they took what he said as unloving. But instead he goes to great lengths to assure them of his love — even to the point of being repetitive.
M. 3 “I do not say this to condemn you, for I said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together.”
N. 2Corinthians 7:3 NIV “I do not say this to condemn you; I have said before that you have such a place in our hearts that we would live or die with you.”
O. 2Cor.7:3 NIGTC “I am not putting you in the wrong when I say this; I have already told you that you have an assured place in my heart—so much so that we are together, come death, come life.”
P. If you are not convicted by this, you are either the most godly person I’ve ever met, or you are self-deceived. Which of us loves like this?
Q. How can Paul feel this way? Was he just a better person than we are? Was he just more loving than we are? It’s so important that we don’t think that way.
1. Remember who Paul was before he met Christ! He was much worse than any of us.
2. And yet somehow he was transformed into this paragon of love. What was the secret?
R. The three keys to Paul’s extraordinary love
1. Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” One reason Paul loved like this was because He had seen the love of Christ in a way we haven’t. How could Christ have loved him when He was such an evil man? Yet He did. Paul knew who he was in himself. And I think frankly many of us don’t really want to know who we are in ourselves. And to the extent we don’t know who we are in ourselves, to that extent we can’t appreciate the love of Christ. And to the extent we can’t appreciate the love of Christ, to that extent we can’t have the love of Christ for others.
2. The second thing to say is that Paul was able to love like this because he realized who these people were. They looked like ordinary people. Sometimes they acted like very ordinary people. But there was something hidden about these people. They were the people Christ suffered for on the cross for. They were the ones the Lord has chosen since before creation. They were the ones who will soon be clothed in glory and gathered to the Lord. They were the ones in whom He made His home. They are the ones of whom Christ says, “Don’t you dare cause one of these little ones to stumble.” (Luke 17:2)
3. There’s one more thing to say about why Paul can love like this. Paul knew that to live is Christ, and most of us really don’t. Most of us are still looking to things in this world to make us happy, but Paul knew that real living is just having Christ. If we were honest, most of us would say we need more than Christ to really live. We need to be doing something productive. We need to be surrounded by people who like us. We need to be able to look in the mirror and be pleased by what we see. We need to be financially secure. We need to be free from pain. We need to have a bright future. And then if we add the hope of heaven to all this, we can be truly happy. But Paul says, “For me to live is Christ.” You see, when we think we need earthly things to truly live, then we can’t truly love. Why? Because instead of seeing people as fellow objects of the love of God, we begin to view people as potential obstacles to our happiness (James 4:1-5) or potential channels through whom we can find happiness. And so, instead of loving people, we either are threatened by them or we seek to use them to make ourselves happy.
V. An afterward on scandals in the church (7:2)
A. Paul’s self-defense in 7:2 (“We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have taken advantage of no one.”) implies that he had been accused of these things by the Judaizers who had infiltrated the Corinthian congregation.
B. This shows that scandal in the ministry was already known in the first generation of the church. People were already using the gospel for earthly gain: wronging people, corrupting people, taking advantage of people. And it has continued through church history up to the present time.
C. This is another way Satan has incited people to close their ears to sources of Christian truth. The scams and scandals in the church which come to light have given people a rational to distrust ALL Christians, especially leaders.
1. It is unfair, of course, to project on all the hypocrisy and fraud of a few, but when people are looking for an excuse not to listen to the word of the Lord, it is understandable that they do.
2. It is inevitable that in the name of Christ some by their scandals will tempt others people to sin. But that doesn’t diminish the price they will pay for doing so. As it says in Matthew 18:7, “It is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes!”
3. This passage makes it clear that, in order to bear a good witness for Christ, it’s very important for Christians to back up their testimony with integrity and sincerity.
D. And one more thing. It is very important to pray for Christian leaders.
1. We can stand back and criticize leaders or we can recognize the spiritual battle and enter into it by praying for church leaders.
2. And who is praying for the Lord to raise up new leaders? The church is desperately in need of leaders who verify the truth of Christ by their lives, leaders who stand strong in Jesus, and don’t give in to the deceptions of the evil one, who are out to serve Christ and not themselves, men full of the Holy Spirit, men who are like the Master. And the Lord Himself commands us to pray that He would raise up laborers for His vineyard (Matt.9:38).