Packer Weakness Is the Way

Life with Christ Our Strength
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3686-1
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Most people think of weakness as purely negative, but true Christianity embraces weakness as a way of life. In this collection of meditations on 2 Corinthians, renowned Bible scholar and theologian J. I. Packer reflects on the central importance of weakness for the Christian life. He exhorts readers to look to Christ for strength, affirmation, and contentment in the midst of their own sin and frailty. Now in his mid-eighties, Packer mediates on the truths of Scripture with pastoral warmth and exegetical care, drawing on lessons learned from the experience of growing older and coming face-to-face with his own mortality. Overflowing with wisdom gleaned from a life of obedience to Christ and dependence on his Word, this encouraging book ultimately directs readers to the God who promises to be ever-present and all-sufficient.

J. I. Packer (1926-2020) served as the Board of Governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College. He authored numerous books, including the classic bestseller Knowing God. Packer also served as general editor for the English Standard Version Bible and as theological editor for the ESV Study Bible.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Packer, J. I.

Leseproben

2

Christ and the Christian’s Calling

Christ is speaking in me. He is not weak. . . . He was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in him, but in dealing with you we will live with him by the power of God.

2 CORINTHIANS 13:3–4

Is Paul Crazy?

As we are beginning to see, 2 Corinthians is unlike any other letter that Paul wrote. The others are written to churches that will accept without question all that he says as coming with apostolic authority—Christ’s authority, in fact. So in those letters Paul is very much the teacher telling it like it is. But here he is writing to Christians many of whom, he knows, do not respect him as an apostle. He is under suspicion with them of being something of a kook, perhaps a fraud, and so his first task must be to recapture, if he can, their confidence in him and readiness to learn from him.

Paul is not, I think, used to such situations. Certainly, his usual confident, logical flow in unfolding his thoughts is diminished, and there is some to-ing and fro-ing, repeating and going back on himself, as he seeks to achieve persuasiveness. He is a preacher dictating a letter, so naturally he speaks in a didactic fashion; yet all the time he seems to be asking himself what he can say to get under the Corinthians’ skin and convince them that he is a person they should love and learn from after all, despite the way the “super-apostles” have put him down.

This needs to be born in mind as we approach the passage that we are to study now, 2 Corinthians 5:6–6:2.

So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience. We are not commending ourselves to you again but giving you cause to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart. For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. For he says,

“In a favorable time I listened to you,

and in a day of salvation I have helped you.”

Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.

It can safely be said that all who appreciate Paul’s apostleship find this section of 2 Corinthians supremely thrilling, indeed overwhelmingly so. The passage is the climax of the first part of the letter, where Paul is baring his soul in order to reestablish trust, love, and responsive rapport between the Corinthians and himself, and to that end he is highlighting his motivation as a servant of God.

Understanding how people tick, as we say, is always fundamental to good relationships with them. Think of husband and wife, and parents and children, for a moment, and you will have no doubt about that. Paul presents himself here as a driven man and indicates what motivations are driving him. The Corinthians, he knows, suspect that the enormity of his energy and enthusiasm for the church-planting work he is doing argues mental unbalance—to put it bluntly, insanity, some form of religious mania.

Paul sweeps the idea aside. “For if we are beside ourselves [the Greek word means, literally, out of our mind], it is for God”—that is, it is between us and him, and no business of yours—but “if we are in our right mind, it is for you” (5:13)—and you must take us seriously. (The plural here, by the way, is not the authorial “we” that is commonplace in English-language literature; it designates Paul and Timothy together, the twosome announced as sending the letter in 1:1. From the start of chapter 3 Paul has been associating Timothy with himself in everything he has said.)

Paul in effect is begging the Corinthians to ask themselves: Is it possible that Paul and his companion are sane after all? Could it be that it is wrong to mock and belittle them? Do we really understand them? Should we not, after all, see them as guides for our faith and life in the way they want us to do? I hope every reader of this book will join the Corinthians in facing up to these same questions.

Paul’s Motivations

In any event, Paul is passionate in desiring that the readers of his letter should properly understand him, and he lays himself on the line accordingly. He now explains what drives him in the risky, hazardous, and often pain-laden service of Jesus Christ that has become his life’s work. His motivation, he tells us, is threefold. The three operative thoughts are distinct, but they overlap, and blend and bond with each other to form a single rope of response, if I may put it so, to the overwhelming fact of Christ. As a result, we see Christ as God incarnate into weakness, the baby son of a poor Jewish girl; Christ for three years a peripatetic, disruptive social and religious outsider; Christ crucified in weakness as a revolutionary who had become a nuisance; Christ, Paul’s loving Sin-Bearer, absorbing divine wrath against him on the cross; Christ now his risen, reigning, returning Lord, his life and his hope.

The three motives are these:

1. Paul wants to give constant pleasure to Christ.

“Whether we are at home [in heaven] or away [still on earth], we make it our aim to please him,” Paul says (5:9). Pleasing those who in some sense have your heart— a spouse, a sibling, a child, a friend, a mentor, a benefactor, or whoever—is a demanding occupation. It calls for imagination, empathy, and effort; you have to be aware of their hopes and expectations that involve you, their likes and dislikes, and their sense of the bond between you and them.

Is this a major motive in our own lives, I wonder: always and under all circumstances to please our Lord and Savior? It was so with Paul, and this agenda, then for him as now for us, is demanding. It requires sustained love to Jesus, expressed in adoration of him for all that he is in himself and thanksgiving to him for all that he has done, for the world of lost humanity in general and for us sinners in particular. It requires sustained obedience to all his commands, up to the limits of our understanding of them. It requires constant watchfulness against temptations to self-indulgence, and constant battling against sloth, laziness, and indifference to spiritual issues. It requires respectful and caring treatment of all others as persons created to bear the image of God, and self-denial at all points where self-absorption would conflict with and damp down active neighbor-love. It requires daily holiness, from morning to night, a daily quest for opportunities to bear witness to Christ, and daily prayer for the furthering of Christ’s kingdom and the blessing of needy people.

There is joy in laboring wholeheartedly to please Christ, as Paul knew, but there is no denying that, as Isaac Watts put it, “love so amazing, so divine [as Christ’s love, supremely displayed at the cross], demands my soul, my life, my all.”

2. Paul wants to be found fully faithful to Christ on judgment day.

Paul continues, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (5:10). Here we must watch our step, for centuries of misunderstanding have obscured Paul’s meaning in this verse and others like it. Paul is not talking about personal salvation as such. He is not hoping for a final justification that would at last be achieved through the merit of his own devoted service, as Roman Catholic teachers, following Augustine, long supposed.

Let it be said, loud and clear: justification, God’s definitive declaration on where we shall spend eternity, is a verdict passed the moment we come to a living faith in Christ. When exactly...