Category: Monthly Message

A Reflection on II Corinthians 13:14

 Do you, like me, find it difficult to know how best to end a letter or an e-mail to a Christian friend?  Yours sincerely or Yours faithfully may be a bit too formal, while Lots of love might be too familiar!  I often use Every blessing, but does that sound paternalistic? Your brother in Christ says what I want to say.

Paul had an excellent way to end what we call II Corinthians; it is a great prayer and summarises all the richness of the Christian faith. Yet they are words with which we have possibly become almost too familiar.  They are words with which we conclude most, if not all, services; but what do they mean?

“May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all”.

 A few verses earlier Paul wrote: “our prayer is for your perfection (literally: ‘mending’)”.

This ‘benediction’ is a prayer for completion, for mending!

1  “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ”.

“grace” means God’s undeserved love; God’s love in action; God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense.  This grace, culminating in the cross, makes reconciliation with God possible.

II Cor 5:19 “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.”

Our nation is divided over Brexit; Parliament is divided over Brexit; nations are torn apart by civil unrest and war; knife-carrying youths are alienated from their families, their schools, their peers. Many individuals suffer mental illness, or crippling guilt; single parents feel helpless against the system; tenants are made miserable by uncaring landlords; some people bear the scars of sexual or domestic abuse, or suffer bitterness because of marital unfaithfulness.  And so one might go on.

Secular-humanist society has no room for God, therefore no higher point of reference or authority than itself. Self-interest and pride lurks in the hearts of the very best and noblest of us.  So our great need is to be reconciled to God.  And he has himself provided that for us!

On the cross Christ “took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows…he was pierced for our transgressions…the punishment that brought us peace was upon him”  (Isaiah 53).

That is the amazing grace of our Lord Jesus Christ!

We can do nothing to improve, or ‘mend’ ourselves or to earn God’s approval or acceptance.

We come to him on the merits of what Christ has already done; we are accepted in him.

2  “the love of God”

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ shows us the love of God, the love which longs that rebels be reconciled, defiled sinners restored. This is a message for our times if ever there was one.

So many feel they are insignificant cogs in an impersonal machine; those who sleep in shop doorways have no-one to love or cherish them; imagine being a young person excluded from school in case their exam failure spoils the school’s achievement record; or the divorcee trying to come to terms with being rejected by the one they thought loved them.

Can we, for one moment, put ourselves in the shoes of the refugee fleeing a cruel regime or an old person who has outlived all their relatives and friends, and about whom no-one cares?

What does the cross of Christ say to such? God loves them, with an active love; he has a place in his heart for them. But even the loved need the love of God, for only that love can meet the deepest of needs.

3  “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit”.

Finding the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ opens up for us the experience of the love of God and that brings us into “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit”.

‘Fellowship’ means sharing with, having something in common; in this case, the Holy Spirit.

So, far from God being non-existent or irrelevant we are united with him in the Holy Spirit!

This has at least two important and encouraging implications:

a  “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children”  (Rom 8:16)

b  “you yourselves are God’s temple and…God’s Spirit lives in you” (I Cor 3:16).

Christians are ‘mended’ people, or rather, we are in the process of being mended.

What a timely encouragement that “we are God’s children” with all that that implies!

If we are God’s children then we are also brothers and sisters to each other, because the same Holy Spirit lives in each one.

 

The aim and substance of our prayer as we pray for one another should be for our perfection (mending).  It is my prayer that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all – now and always.  Amen

Warmest greetings in Christ,

Tony Mason

Chairman, Saffron Walden Bible Focus

A Reflection on II Corinthians 12:7-10

The first church I had the privilege of serving was not far from Heathrow Airport. One day, shortly after I had started there, I received a phone call from the editor of the Baptist Times asking me to attend a press conference there and report on it for the paper.  Billy Graham was returning home from Northern Ireland via London and was going to make a statement on his visit.  Deeply aware of the heavy responsibility of getting all my facts right, I arrived very early for the press conference, armed with a tape-recorder (yes this was nearly 50 years ago!), and determined to sit as near the front as possible.  On arrival I found the room completely empty and had a choice of any seat in the front row.  I sat there alone for a while and then heard someone come in, walk towards the front, come along my row and sit down next to me.  I turned, and this person offered me his right hand.  “Hello, I’m Billy Graham”, he said.

In all humility I am proud to have had the opportunity to meet this great man of God.  And yet I am mindful, too, of the words of Jeremiah 9:23,24: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,’ declares the Lord”.

Paul had “heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell” (II Cor 12:4).  But that had been fourteen years previously.  Now, however, he wouldn’t boast about that but rather about his weaknesses.  Now, his awareness of God’s all-sufficient grace is not dependent upon “inexpressible things”.  Now, he has the assurance from the Lord: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”. 

Like many of you reading this, I can look back to great experiences of the Lord’s blessings in the past and I am mindful of the limitations that are beginning to show as the years progress. But how exciting that is!  The world looks at the latter years of one’s life as a period of weakness, restriction, disablement.  But the Christian knows that God’s compassions “are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:23) and that his “grace is sufficient for (us), for (his) power is made perfect in weakness” (II Corinthians 12:9).  Therefore, like Paul, let us delight in those weaknesses that give us the opportunity to experience the Lord’s strength.

Be blessed, and be a blessing,

Tony Mason

A Reflection on II Corinthians 4:6-9

January is a month of grey skies, threats of snow, coughs and colds, and people generally complaining as if January isn’t usually like this.    And I won’t even mention any political crisis!   How good, then, in the midst of any gloom and doom you may be experiencing, to read and ponder the words of II Corinthians 4:6-9.

“God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ”(v6).

This gospel that we love, and rejoice in, and long to share, and have found to be so profoundly life-changing is from God himself.  It is not of our own invention or due to our own ability of merit.  We are merely clay jars! (v7).  As such we falter from time to time, even fail. But we are never utterly broken.  “We are”, Paul writes (vv8,9) “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed”. 

Notice the repetition of “but not…”.  Doubtless Paul had many times prayed about the difficulties he constantly faced.  Did God answer?  The fact that he could say “but not” indicates that he did.  Do we sometimes feel that God does not, or is slow to, answer our prayers when we, too, are ‘hard pressed…crushed…perplexed…persecuted…struck down’? We will realise how much he is answering prayer when we stop and think about the ‘but not’s’ in our situation.  Yes, we may well be up against this and that, but we are not ‘crushed…in despair…abandoned…destroyed’.  Such is the power of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in the life of the believer!

As Christians we have this treasure, the gospel, in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.

Whether you are just waiting for the dark days of winter to give way to the spring, or whether you are passing through dark days in your life and you cannot see beyond them, may you know “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”

 

Tony Mason