The Paradox of Ministry : Part 2
Are you protected? You may be asking, “protected from what?” The initial question is somewhat open-ended, it can be answered in quite a few different ways. Some people may be asking whether or not your property is protected by insurance for physical damage. Or maybe it’s liability insurance to protect you from a potential lawsuit if someone is injured on your property. As human beings, we try to protect the things that are valuable to us.
Here’s another question; “does the Gospel need to be protected?” What do you think? One way to get at the answer is to ask more questions, right? Here are a couple; if the Gospel needs to be protected, how does that happen; what must the Gospel be protected from? And another, “isn’t it God’s responsibility to protect the Gospel?”
By now I hope you’re thinking seriously about this question. And, as we continue our study in Second Corinthians, we’ll discover the answer to this question. So, let me read the text again. After I do that, we’ll review just a bit and then continue with our study. The text is Second Corinthians 6:1 to 10.
As we began this study previously on The Voice of Hope, I said that in this text, Paul lists four PERSPECTIVES that help us understand “The Paradox of Ministry.”
The first perspective we looked at was the perspective of privilege. And I asked this question; Do you understand the dignity of your work? For the Christian, all work that’s done well, except what the scriptures prohibit, has eternal value. You and I are in a cooperative effort with the sovereign God, the Creator, and Sustainer of all things! Do we truly appreciate that the way we should? I am sure I don’t. I need to grasp that more deeply.
The second perspective to help us understand the paradox of ministry was the privilege of passion. Paul’s passion was for the pure word of God. As followers of Christ and reconcilers with Him, we need that same passion. Our passion as ministers, as servants of the Lord, is to plead with people to leave spiritual infancy and grow to maturity. And that takes pleading, it takes repetition, it takes patience. Sometimes it looks like we’re getting nowhere with people; they seem to take two steps forward and three steps back. But we need to press on and not give up.
So, we have the perspective of privilege and the perspective of passion to help us understand the paradox of ministry.
The Next Perspective (to help us understand the paradox of ministry) is,
The Perspective of Protection
Here’s where we get into the idea of the Gospel needing protection. Verse three tells us what the Gospel needs to be protected from. Look at what Paul wrote. “We give no offense in anything, that our ministry may not be blamed.”
This statement in the original language contains a double negative. In English, that makes a positive. Not so in Greek. We could translate it this way, “Giving absolutely NO offense or stumbling block in anything lest the ministry of the Gospel be faulted.” Did you catch that? It’s not stated directly, but here’s what I understand Paul to be saying; the Gospel needs to be protected by the reputation of the proclaimers.
We know the Gospel carries its own offensiveness. The god of this world has blinded the minds...
