Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4:16-18
Good morning. Once again, I have the privilege of filling in for Pastor Mark while he is away. For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Dan Jones, and I serve as a Deacon at First Baptist. I am married to my lovely wife Holly and we have five children and five grandchildren. When pastor asked me to fill in for him several months ago, I knew I would be preaching from the book of second Corinthians, but not the specific passage that I would be assigned. In looking through this book as part of my own study, I came across chapter 4 verses 16 through 18 and secretly hoped that this was the portion of scripture I would be assigned. My prayer is that you would be touched by these verses as much as I was in preparing this message.
In 1915, a ship on an expedition became trapped in the ice of the Antarctic Sea, unable to move forward or backwards for months. The crew watched as ice slowly engulfed and crushed the hull, until the ship sank entirely beneath the ice, leaving 28 men stranded on a frozen, drifting sea, with no radio, no hope of rescue, and no one on earth who knew that they were even there. They camped on the ice floes for months, hunting seals to survive, watching their only shelter disappear under their feet. When the ice finally broke apart, they loaded themselves into three small lifeboats and rode through some of the most violent seas on earth, just to reach an empty uninhabited island. Solid ground, but no one would ever think of looking for them there. From there, the captain chose five men to attempt the almost unthinkable, an 800-mile voyage over open ocean in a modified lifeboat. This was to be followed by a 36-hour journey, on foot, without proper equipment, across an unmapped glacial mountain range, just to reach a remote whaling station that might – might still be in operation. They made it. Then their captain turned around and went back for the rest of his men, refusing to leave anyone behind. Every single member of the expedition survived, nearly two years after they set out, never having completed what was originally set out to do. This was the Shackleton Antarctic expedition, and the name of their ship was “Endurance”.
This morning, what are some words that come to mind when you hear the word endurance? Perseverance, maybe grit, patience or longevity?
Endurance can be defined as:
I like to think of endurance as the pushback against giving up on something due to a hardship.
Some athletes push their physical bodies to test their endurance. There was a televised competition a few years ago called the Eco Challenge. It was a race where the difficulty was extreme by design. Enduring the race meant pushing through sustained physical punishment with almost no rest. Contestants were required to run, bike, canoe and swim, racing over 400 miles, non-stop over mountains, jungles and oceans with little or no sleep for days on end. Now I don’t know about you but purposely choosing to go through that kind of physical punishment doesn’t sound like a fun time to me.
However, all people deal with bad situations and trouble in their lives. Job says that “man is born to trouble, as sparks fly upward” and that “man who is born of woman is few of days and full of trouble”. Despite what some false preachers teach, believers are not immune to the troubles of this life. Jesus plainly tells us that “in this world you will have tribulation”. And James tells us to “consider it all joy my brethren “if”, you encounter trials”? Wait a minute, did I say that right? No, I don’t think that is how it goes, he says, “consider it all joy my brethren “when”, you encounter trials”.
This morning if you would open your bibles to 2nd Corinthians chapter 4 verses 16 through 18, we are going to look at how Paul models endurance for us in the face of troubles and hardships.
READ: 2nd Corinthians 4:16 -18
We just read from the ESV translation of the Bible, and verse 16 started with the word “so” but if we look to most of the other translations, we see that verse 16 starts with the word “therefore”. As is always the case when we see the word therefore, we need to find out what it is there for. The therefore in verse 16, looks directly at the verses that pastor spoke on last week. In these previous verses, Paul likens us to holding the “Light of knowledge” regarding Jesus Christ, in “jars of clay.” Jars that are fragile and susceptible to decay. This is the same phrase Paul used in verse 1 of this chapter — “we do not lose heart” — now introduced with “Therefore”. Or put another way, “Therefore we endure”. In the next three verses, Paul is going to give us three principles for Endurance so as not to lose heart.
Principle #1 – Value Spiritual Strength over Physical Strength
In verse 16 Paul says, ”though our outer self is wasting away”. The outer self or outer man that Paul speaks of here is our earthly bodies. Earlier in this chapter, verse 7 likens our body to “earthen vessels or jars of clay” and in verse 11 “mortal flesh”. From the day we are born, our bodies begin to naturally decay as part of the normal aging process. That process affects us all; no one is immune to it. My 40-year-old son is plagued with back problems, I am 63 and I don’t hear or see like I used to, and my father is 94 and he has a hard time getting around without a cane or walker. Paul saw this physical decay in his own life, not only through the normal aging process but accelerated by hardships as a consequence of his faith and ministry. Those hardships are mentioned in verses 8 through 9, “afflicted”, “perplexed”, “persecuted” and “struck down”. Then fully catalogued in chapter 11 verses 24 through 28. Paul writes, “Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the 40 lashes less 1. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and in thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.
While I believe that in this verse Paul is specifically speaking to the aging process, I think we can also consider the outer self wasting away due to illness or other infirmity, which does not necessarily only take place as people age. There are many examples of people struck down in the prime of their life due to sickness or terminal disease.
Aging bodies also can affect our mental state. Studies show that when some elderly or infirmed are faced with the knowledge that their bodies are failing, feelings of depression and uselessness set in. In a study on aging commissioned by the NIH, their report opened with this quote, “The true evil of old age is not the weakening of the body but the indifference of the soul.” How a person responds to their outer man decaying depends on either one of two things. We can either base our worth on how physically productive we can be, which is based on a positive self-perception, or the better way, which Paul gives us, one that doesn’t depend on physical strength at all.
Continuing in verse 16, Paul says our inner self is being renewed day by day. Paul moves from speaking about the physical body to the inner man, which is his heart and his soul. To endure, Paul tells us to focus on the inner man. He demonstrated this in the scripture that Dorothy read this morning, Ephesians 3 verses 13 through 19. Paul starts his prayer for the believers in Ephesus in verse 14 by saying, “For this reason I bow my knees before the father”. The statement ,“For this reason” looks back to verse 13, Where again Paul uses the phrase, “So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you which is to your glory”. Paul prays for encouragement, that according to the riches of God’s glory He may grant the Ephesian believers be strengthened with power through his spirit in their inner being.
In verse 16 of our text, what Paul describes as our inner man is being renewed day by day, today this is what we describe as sanctification in action. Puritan John Owen called sanctification “the universal renovation of our natures by the Holy Spirit into the image of God.” Wayne Grudem defined it as “a progressive work of God and man that makes us more and more free from sin and like Christ in our actual lives”. Theologians have used different words to describe the same reality Paul names in this one sentence: the inner man’s renewal is God’s ongoing work of conforming a believer to Christ. Work that has nothing to do with the outer man’s decline. Aging does not interrupt sanctification. Instead, J.I. Packer wrote, “God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives. Felt weakness deepens dependence on Christ for strength each day. The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away.” Our bodies wear out, but our souls can be renewed day by day, aging for the Christian is intended to be a progressive sanctification. Sanctification is the name for what is promised in verse 16, when the body loses ground, the soul of a believer can be gaining it.
Verse 17 starts, “For this light momentary affliction”. Here Paul is speaking of affliction using a phrase that is describes it as “light and momentary”. The Greek translation of word for momentary is to “express brief duration or immediately” and “light” means “light in weight or easy to bear”. You could read that part of verse 17 as, “this very light weight, easy to bear and very brief affliction.” However, in strictly human terms the afflictions that Paul suffered were anything but light. We saw how earlier in this chapter he catalogued his afflictions. Specifically, he says that he is always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake. Paul was not minimizing his affliction, trying to play some mind game on himself, He didn’t just read Norman Vincent Peale’s book on the power of positive thinking. No, Paul knew exactly the severity of his afflictions.
The reason that Paul could honestly call his afflictions light and momentary comes in the back half of this verse. “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison”. First, Paul is saying that the light momentary affliction is “preparing for us”. This means that Paul sees a purpose in affliction. Scripture gives numerous examples of how God uses affliction or suffering to aid in our spiritual growth. Romans 5 says that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope”. James tells us that “the testing of your faith produces steadfastness”. In Psalm 119 verse 71, the psalmist recognized this when he wrote; “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes”. Finally, Peter wrote in regard to trials, “so that the tested genuineness of your faith… may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ”. The second reason Paul can say his affliction is light and momentary is the object of this preparation. He says that it “Is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory”.
The Greek word used for weight has the meaning of “burdensome or heavy” and eternal meaning “without beginning or end”. Paul honestly sees his afflictions as light and momentary because he knows that in view of the eternal glory he’s being prepared for, his present troubles are just a blip on the radar. Having just made the case that Paul sees affliction as producing eternal glory, there is a caveat. John MacArthur in his commentary on this verse writes, “The only suffering that produces the eternal weight of glory is suffering for the sake of Christ, or that honors Him. Whether suffering comes from believers’ faithful, loyal, committed testimony about Jesus Christ, or the patient enduring of life’s normal trials, such as disease, divorce, poverty, and loneliness, if endured with a humble, grateful, God-honoring attitude, it will add to the eternal weight of glory. On the other hand, suffering the consequences of sin does not contribute to our heavenly blessing and could remove some of the reward already gained.” I will conclude this second principle by saying, to many generations of church leaders, Paul’s use of the phrase “light affliction” is never minimizing. Rather it is a comparison made in the light of eternity. What distinguishes a believer from a non-believer is not that the believer feels less pain but that he weighs it on a different scale. This leads us to the third of Paul’s principles on endurance.
Verse 18 starts in the middle of a sentence that begins in verse 17. Paul just got done telling us that momentary light affliction is producing eternal glory. He continues “as we look not” to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. In John Calvin’s commentary on this verse he writes, “Faith “looks” not at things visible but at things invisible. Hence it is, that troubles do not crush it. Calvin emphasizes that verse 18 is an “active” posture of faith”. In Greek, the verb that means “we look” describes deliberate contemplation, not accidental or momentary glancing. In other words, this “we look not” is not automatic for believers, it requires effort and intentionality. Paul writes that “we look not on things that are seen but to the things that are unseen”. This exhortation by Paul is seen throughout the New Testament. In 2nd Corinthians 5 it says, “for we walk by faith not by sight”. In Colossians Paul writes, “seek the things that are above, where Christ is… set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth”. The writer of Hebrews has a direct commentary on this text when he said of Moses; “He endured as seeing him who is invisible”. As Christians we are to train ourselves to look to those things that are unseen, that is the glory to come, not with our physical eyes but with our spiritual ones.
Paul finishes verse 18 with; “For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal”. He says that the things that are seen are “transient”. Transient has the meaning of “temporary for short lived”. James brings this point into focus when he writes, “yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time then vanishes”. Think about it, our very life, our earthly existence, something that we obsess over and worry about, James calls it a mist, a vapor. Something that in the scope of eternity is here and gone in the blink of an eye. Paul magnifies it as well when in first Corinthians he writes that, “the present form of this world is passing away”. In contrast to this first part of the verse, Paul says that the things that are unseen are eternal. We saw earlier that these unseen things are “without beginning or end”, which is the exact opposite to the very finite, temporary things. There is a rich history of Bible teachers and scholars that speak to this verse.
Early church father John Chrysostom when speaking about affliction, asks the question, “How then light?” Then answers his own question by saying, “while we look not at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen. So both this present be light, and the future be great if we withdraw ourselves from the things that are seen.
Alexander McLaren, an early 19th century Baptist minister, wrote this in his commentary on verse 18. “By the things that are seen Paul means the whole of the visible world, with all its circumstances and relations, and by the things not seen he means the reality beyond the stars. Do not habitually think of these two sets of objects as present and future, but rather as the things that are seen and the things that are not seen.” Consider that last statement for a moment, too often we think in terms of present and future. We look around at the troubles of the here and now, waiting for things to change at some point in the future. However, the unseen eternal things are not a distant future reality but present invisible realities that are there for us to discover.
I want to wrap things by sharing my life experience where I have seen these principles modeled and have made a lasting impact on my Christian walk. Many of you know that I was a widower at 30, before God brought Holly into my life. This is the story of my first wife Laura. Laura became a Christian at a young age, when I met her and started attending church with her we were in our teens. Even at that young age she was teaching junior church and was involved in the childrens ministry. We got married at 19 and had our daughter ten months later at the age of 20. At the start of her 21st year she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. That diagnosis was the start of a 10-year roller coaster ride as she dealt with everything that came along with that kind of diagnosis. Three rounds of chemotherapy, a brain hemorrhage, 2 surgeries, a course of radiation therapy, side effects that for a time made walking almost impossible, and a high-risk pregnancy with the birth of our son. Now lest you think that I’m exaggerating a bit for effect, the list is much longer, those are just the highlights for the sake of time. Laura understood what it meant to have a body that was deteriorating yet her inner woman never faltered, her sickness was a time of spiritual growth for both of us. Laura never let her sickness stand in the way of living her life and loving the Lord. She did not use it as an excuse to slow down or to only focus on herself. With all that was going on with her sickness, it was rare that she would miss Sunday service or not be involved in the life of the church. Her focus on the eternal was inspirational for all that knew her. We had many conversations, with her asking the what if questions. What if I die? What will you do? How will the kids deal with me being gone? But she never questioned what would happen to her. She knew that if she wasn’t healed, she would eventually fall asleep and wake up in eternity. That knowledge brought her through the rough times and gave her peace in this life. Laura’s faith and focus on Christ was an example for me and it has helped to shape my Christian walk. Today, I see these same principles at work in Harry’s life as he walks through his time of trouble.
Let’s review Paul’s 3 Principles for Endurance
There is a popular saying that originated with a self-help secular psychologist that goes, “Don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff.” Today, I’d like to redeem it for our use. Don’t sweat the small stuff of this world, because next to God’s grace and eternal glory even our heaviest affliction is small.
Now may the Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word. Amen
