Study in2 Corinthians

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The Folly Of Gullibility

Chap 11v1-15Presentation 15

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IntroductionAs an introductory exercise write in your mind a list of the things that you believe prevent people from discovering the truth about Jesus and growing in their knowledge of him. Does your list contain the word ‘gullibility’. I think that would be near the top of Paul’s list as he thought about the church in Corinth. A. W. Tozer writes.‘Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything’.

The church in Corinth were too ready to believe what others told them and this lay behind the confusion which existed in their midst.

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Answering A Fool According To His FollyIronically, Paul, a true apostle of Jesus Christ was being accused of being a false apostle by those who were themselves false apostles. This now forces him into the embarrassing position of blowing his own trumpet. It made him feel an idiot v1.... [Solomon advises, ‘answer the fool according to his folly’.] Since Paul is already an object of ridicule in the eyes of many he risks making a bigger fool of himself by telling them how he feels about them;‘I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ’.

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Answering A Fool According To His FollyPaul is not making all this fuss for the sake of his good name but because a much larger issue was involved. Paul’s opponents were trying to undermine not simply Paul, but the gospel he proclaimed. They felt his Christianity needed a face lift. They wanted a Christianity which would be more acceptable to the Greek culture of their day.

Paul saw something sinister in that. Something devilish. He saw the church being seduced, like a bride being drawn away from her true love. He sees a pattern re-emerging when Eve was seduced by Satan in Eden and drawn away from her commitment to God.

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Answering A Fool According To His FollyPaul is fiercely possessive of the church he had founded, just as a father would watch jealously over the welfare of his daughter. He was not the kind of possessive father who says, ‘I will never let go of my daughter, I will never let her marry’. Paul wanted to give his daughter away but only to the One to whom she was engaged and to whom she rightfully belonged, to Christ. In the interim, he was concerned that she might be compromised by her flirtation with the world! ‘For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough. v4

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Answering A Fool According To His FollyPaul is appalled that they have more time for ‘spiritual gigolos’ than they do for their spiritual father. Paul does not question their orthodoxy. No obvious heretical errors were being taught. Their error lay in the methodology they were encouraged to adopt and style of leadership they embraced. They were being persuaded to present a gospel that would appeal to Greek society, a gospel which majored on strength not on weakness, in heavenly triumph and not on earthly suffering. They wanted a Christianity that pushed the cross into a shadowy background and brought the spotlight of glory and blessing into the foreground. This is the seduction that infuriated Paul.

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A Threefold DefenceOne charge levelled against Paul was that his ministry lacked polish v6. By the standards of the Greek oratory Paul's public communication was ordinary while his opponents in Corinth had dazzled the church by their eloquence.

Primeminister Disraeli once said of Gladstone that he was ‘inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity’. He got high on public speaking,! Ordinary folk hadn’t the slightest idea what he was saying.

In contrast, Paul’s preaching was plain and unvarnished, but it was substantial. He communicated truth. Paul believed content to be much more important than polish and that persuaded him he was not an inferior communicator.

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A Threefold DefenceSecondly, Paul was accused of being unprofessional v7... He did not charge for his evangelism. There is a mind set that believes the more you pay for something the more it must be worth. This has helped designer labels to flourish in the West. This mind set also operates in the third world e.g. some believe that the more you pay for a medicine the better it must be.

Paul’s rivals tapped into this mind set suggesting that since Paul’s evangelism came free, if, unlike them he didn’t charge a proper fee, then he couldn’t be much of a preacher.

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A Threefold DefencePaul’s response is that the inexpensiveness of his ministry was not a mark of amateurism but a carefully developed missionary strategy. It would have cheapened the gospel to make people pay for it. Paul would then have been no different from the professional entertainers, the religious charlatans of the ancient world who sold religion for money. Paul did not charge fees but he did allow Christians to provide voluntarily for his needs!

The logic of his opponents argument defies comprehension that his failure to charge indicated a lack of love for his hearers.

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A Threefold DefencePaul's irony disappears in v13-15 and we discover what he thinks of the super-apostles..... When Satan wants to injure the church he dresses himself up as a Christian. Imitation and counterfeit are his stock in trade. This is how he introduces confusion to the church. Christians are lured away from the path of truth by plausible charm and deceptive subterfuge. There are a number of tests devised by banks to authenticate banknotes, similarly there are tests we need to apply to authenticate gospel messengers. The two distinguishing marks that the devil is incapable of removing from his products are moral quality and final destiny. The tongues of Satan's agents may sound spiritual but their lives bear a tell-tale trademark, ‘produce of hell’ and that will be their destiny v15 ‘their end will be what their actions deserve’.

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A Threefold DefenceThe greatest danger to the Christian church is not rampant materialism or scientific scepticism but a growth in public gullibility. G. K. Chesterton said that,

‘when people abandon truth, they do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything’.

There are hundreds of sects in the world today which we might expect would strain the credulity of Simple Simon in the things they claim and teach. But their apparent numerical success would suggest that people are prepared to believe anything.

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A Threefold Application1. DON’T LET WORDS FOOL YOUPaul’s rivals were good with words. That should not surprise us because the devil is a master of persuasion. Clever words are his stock in trade. Sometimes he uses flattery in order to massage our egos and feed our intellectual pride . We may feel we are beginning to live on the edge of excitement when we listen to the very latest in theological speculation so that we find ourselves asking, ‘How did we ever find any satisfaction in that old fashioned conservative biblical theology in which we used to believe?’

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A Threefold Application1. DON’T LET WORDS FOOL YOUYou may think, “I could never fall for that”! Well a N.T. scholar, who was a household name in Scotland - an exponent of a liberal anti supernatural theology, was in his early years a committed evangelical and effective open air preacher. He later ridiculed the gospel he once preached. It flatters our egos to tell ourselves, that these new ideas are for truly intelligent Christians and that conservative Christianity is for those who have never crept out of the Victorian era. Some believe that by embracing ‘new teaching’ they will win the approval of the academic world.

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A Threefold Application1. DON’T LET WORDS FOOL YOUBut the devil also makes great use of distorted words. He can use the same vocabulary as Biblical Christianity but subtly pour in a different meaning. This is precisely what was happening at Corinth. The false teachers were happy to talk about ‘Jesus’, ‘the Spirit’ and ‘the gospel’ but the content they gave these words was quite different. And so behind a facade of orthodoxy confusion was sown. This is precisely what heretical sects do. A Jehovah Witness will quite happily say that ‘Jesus is the son of God’ but he means by that something entirely different from orthodox Christianity.

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A Threefold Application1. DON’T LET WORDS FOOL YOUGuard against being fooled by mere words. False teachers do not need to be outspoken in their heretical views to be false to the gospel. Indeed, you would be hard pressed to make any heresy charge stick in dealing with them. They had surrendered the gospel to the secular mood of their day. This revealed itself in their method of evangelism, in the emphasis of their preaching, and in their leadership style. Worldliness isn’t to be confused with false teaching. Wordiness is often found in genuinely orthodox churches. ‘Worldliness is not the result of having no cross in your theology, it is the result of having no cross in your life.’

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A Threefold Application2. DO NOT BE NAIVE ABOUT MONEYSecondly, Paul saw that how evangelism was financed was enormously important. He realised that money can corrupt a preacher. Find out where money raised for evangelism comes from and where it goes. You may be shocked. Successful religion is ‘big business’ today and some are eager to exploit the religious market. One reason Paul refused to allow the Corinthians to support him materially was that he wanted to separate himself from those who peddled the gospel for financial gain. He was a preacher not a salesman!

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A Threefold Application2. DO NOT BE NAIVE ABOUT MONEYPaul was prepared to allow believers to support him in his missionary task but he was not prepared to accept fees for services rendered. To do so can alter how the preacher is perceived. He did not want to be paid for a good performance like some street entertainer or street busker. That would devalue the gospel. Paul determined to retain his ‘amateur’ status. Once we see preaching as a professional career we have begun to exchanging our high calling for an entertainment license and then we begin to ask what will keep the fans happy?

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A Threefold Application3. GUARD AGAINST A MISPLACED SENTIMENTALITYHas Paul been unduly severe in describing his opponents as false apostles and deceitful workmen? Should we not be more tolerant of such people? But they were not merely deluded Christian brothers who needed deeper instruction! Paul saw them as agents of Satan intent upon sabotaging the church. Of being spanners in the works! Satan is eager to infiltrate the church. With reference to his own intimate disciple band Jesus said, "Have I not chosen you, the Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil!" (He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the Twelve, was later to betray him.) Jn. 6.70

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A Threefold Application3. GUARD AGAINST A MISPLACED SENTIMENTALITYTo argue for a loving tolerance for all teaching is to engage in ill-informed gooey, chocolate box, sentimentality. Sentimentality, is undiscriminating love, and Christian love can never be that. Genuine Christian tolerance is a virtue born of a strong conviction that the truth will vindicate itself. Modern humanistic tolerance is a vice born of mass indecision about the truth. It dare not confess any particular belief for fear of being accused of narrow-mindedness.Paul’s love for the Corinthian church did not stop him from denouncing as agents of Satan those who drew the people’s hearts away from the true gospel v11. He says, ‘I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy’.

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A Threefold Application3. GUARD AGAINST A MISPLACED SENTIMENTALITY

The most important things aren’t the things about which all men agree but those they're willing to fight for. Of course it’s possible to fight over trivia and there are many examples of that. But it’s a greater mistake to refuse to fight at all. We delude ourselves if we believe that all men are struggling together to discover the truth.

The one whom Jesus described as ‘the father of lies’ is at work in the world and in the church. His aim is to sow untruths. We need to learn to resist him and not capitulate to a modern sentimentality.

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ConclusionA local church is in danger when composed of gullible Christians. The real threat is not unbelief but wrong belief; not scepticism but superstition; not irreligion but gullibility, not the doubter but the deceiver; the subtle infiltration of saboteurs who exploit gullible Christians. In a day when leading churchmen deny the atoning power of Christ’s death and a literal, historical, resurrection, and TV evangelists become millionaires, we need to guard against being fooled by words, and against being naive about money and against being sentimental about tolerance. God can strengthen our hearts as we seek his wisdom and discernment to know what is right and the resolve of will to follow it.