Happy New Year!

I hope this year is better than last year for you and your family. And I hope regular worship is a part of

your plan to make it a better year.

We are kicking off the year with a sermon series on 2 Corinthians. We should finish in the middle of June, so settle in for the journey. You may not have read this book of the Bible, but you will probably recognize quotes from it. It is full of powerful verses. I think it includes Paul’s most poetic and moving verses. To save time in the preaching and to help you prepare for the series, let me share some background information on the letter.

The letter is written to the church in the ancient city of Corinth. It may sound strange to say the church in a city, given that most cities today have numerous churches. Back then, which was around AD 50-55, Christianity was just getting started. A major city like Corinth would only have one church. Corinth was one of the most prosperous cities in the Ancient Greece. On the hilltop overlooking it in the days of Paul was the temple for Aphrodite. It housed a massive prostitution business connected to the pagan worship of the goddess. The wealth, sex, and pagan worship made Corinth a challenging place to build the Christian Church.

2 Corinthians is at least the second, if not the third letter written to the Christians in Corinth. The first one is 1 Corinthians. It was written to address serious lapses in the moral conduct of the Christians and division that erupted. After the first letter was written, a group of hardline, legalistic people infiltrated the leadership of the church. They instituted a return to the laws of Moses, they rejected the covenant of grace taught by Paul, and they rejected all the apostles who followed Paul. They viewed their doctrine as superior to Paul’s. They viewed themselves as the true representation of Christ.

Paul received word of this group’s infiltration and returned to Corinth to deal with it. We don’t

have the record of this trip, but Paul specifically refers to it in chapter 12. He also references the trip in chapter 2 as a painful trip. It appears from context that the trip had its desired effect and the legalistic leaders were denounced and removed from leadership. These “super-apostles”, as he sarcastically refers to them, didn’t go away, though, and were still causing trouble. Thus, he wrote 2 Corinthians.

The letter is the most personal of all the ones Paul wrote. It contains more about Paul’s personal

life than any other. It includes Paul’s reflections on his own leadership style and motivation as a counterbalance to the disruptive “super apostles”. And he is vulnerable about his weakness as a leader, placing his dependence completely on Christ. In addition to the letter being very personal and emotional, Paul covers ideas like the connection of suffering and following Christ, the value of God’s covenant of grace, how endurance in adversity displays the presence and power of God, how repentance should produce holy living, and points to the hope of God’s transforming grace available now and the fullest expression of it in the future.

I hope you will join us for this journey, and find a place to connect in community here on Sunday mornings.

Blessings,

James Harper