Author: Bryan Richardson

Re:Verse reading 2 Corinthian 12:1-10 (day three)

To keep me from becoming conceited…

Can you be trusted with power?  Whether it’s a car engine or a piece of exclusive news, the opportunities to exercise power over others exert a strong force on your life.  What is it about seeing motorists recede in your rearview mirror, or watching others hang on your every word as you reveal something they’re dying to know?  Horsepower and headlines will tend to convince you that you’re important—and then, more important than others.  Those are relatively low stakes, but what happens when pride arises in matters of greater importance?  Pride will render a heart incapable of love.  And so, further questions: What would you do if you did not love?  Why would you not view others as obstacles to your will?  Paul isn’t talking about being “stuck up”.  He’s talking about being deadly.

Re:Verse reading–2 Corinthians 10 (day three)

“…so that we can preach the gospel in the regions beyond you.”

Jesus told us to exercise great care in the way we use language. He well knew that we’re capable of using explanations to obfuscate, questions to manipulate, and answers to complicate.  “Yes” comes with strings attached.  “No” serves as a way to marginalize others.  Paul urgently seeks to clarify that he has not weaponized his strong language to the Corinthians.  He eagerly desires that he and the church speak to each other plainly and without pretense so that all their energy can instead go toward showing Christ to the human race.  We have to figure this out.  If the church can’t speak rightly to one another, there’s no way it can say anything to the world.

Re:Verse reading–2 Corinthians 7:5-16 (day three) 

“This body of ours had no rest, but we were harassed at every turn—conflicts on the outside, fears within.”

There is a triumphalist tendency in popular Christianity which airbrushes and streamlines the rough and tumble of faith in Christ.  The result is the prettiest pictures of Christians you could ever imagine: nice, sincere, unflappable, harboring no doubts, no anxieties, no sadness.  Rubbish.  If you would love your neighbor—a person whose life you can actually affect—it is necessary that you lay bare your weakness.  Not your theoretical weakness—as in “I was blind but now I see” or “They are weak but he is strong”—but your actual weakness.  Pull back the curtain.  The world’s aching need is a vision of somebody confident enough in Christ to struggle before others as a weak person in real time.

Re:Verse reading–2 Corinthians 4 (day three)

“What is seen is temporary.”

Paul said it earlier: “The world in its present form is passing away.”  The pattern of this age, the stopgaps, the diversions, the workarounds—all of what we think of as “just the way things are”—really have only the most tenuous hold on the universe.  It’s only a matter of time before these bankrupt systems of living completely collapse. You might not want to get too celebratory about that just yet.  How are we supposed to live if we can’t depend on what we thought were the cold hard facts of life?  Don’t repeal if you can’t replace.  This is what Paul was getting at when he spoke of his longing that “Christ be formed” in people.  Christ teaching you your work habits, Christ teaching you how to think—determine to learn from him.

Re:Verse reading–2 Corinthians 1:12-24, 2:1-11 (day three) 

“It was in order to spare you that I did not return to Corinth.”

Paul was right about the Corinthian church. He was right, and history would bear him out. It would have been a glorious moment of battle for the sake of purity in the church, with his detractors vanquished and the church cleansed of all the troublemakers. But Paul had learned long ago that the upper hand has no place in the fellowship of love. With one fiery visit he would have saved the idea of church, only to kill its community. The church is not an idea. It is a people. And people learn painstakingly, and minds change incrementally. So love—the most powerful force in the universe—is slow. Waiting means more than winning. Weakness means more than waylaying. And then people learn to live like Jesus.

Re:Verse reading–2 Corinthians 1:1-11 (day three)

“If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation.”

The real wreckage that has resulted from the fall of man is not that suffering occurs.  It is that we have no idea what suffering means.  A well-known author and lecturer with an atheistic perspective sums up his understanding of humanity’s quest as avoidance of suffering.  What an impoverished legacy such a viewpoint would leave to us.  If there is nothing more at the base level of reality than the maintenance of ease for a little while, then we are nothing more than collections of decaying molecules.  But Paul—following the trail blazed by Jesus Christ—wakes us up to the knowledge that suffering itself testifies to a glory that was lost, and can be found again.

Re:Verse passage – I Corinthians 15:3-20, 35-44, 50-57 (day three)

“If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.”

A body is by definition physical.  What, then, is a “spiritual body”?  It’s a body powered by the spiritual realm instead of by the natural realm.  The body isn’t a piece of inferior work to be superseded by something better.  It is God’s handiwork, and is, in God’s own words, “very good.”  Paul says that at the resurrection the physical body will actually live forever because it will be powered by the inexhaustible resources of the spiritual realm.  In other words, the age to come will be grounded, not ghostly—solid, not shadowy.  Keep in mind the words the resurrected Jesus said after “Peace be with you.”  He said, “Do you have anything to eat?”  A real body in a real world—that’s what the resurrection promises.

Re:Verse reading–1 Corinthians 13 (day three) 

“Love never fails.” 

Fails to what?  To “be there” for you when you come to your senses?  No, it’s already with you in your foolishness.  You are never beyond love’s presence, though you might be unwilling to receive it or believe it or learn its ways—so unwilling that it might seem you’ve become unable to do so.  Ask yourself: Does anybody in your life regard you with love, however imperfectly acted upon?  Most likely, you will say yes.  If then you have not wandered beyond love’s reach, you have not wandered beyond God’s reach, because love is the mark of God’s regard for you.  And if another person would claim that his or her life is devoid of the love of parent, friend, spouse, or child—a great tragedy—what then? Will love announce its presence through you?