AP

2 Corinthians 5:11   Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others.  What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience.

Paul was in absolutely no doubt whatsoever as to what his purpose in life was.

Because he knew what it is to ‘fear the Lord’, he knew that there would come a day when he would be called on to give account of his stewardship of the resources and opportunities God had entrusted to him during the days of his earthly pilgrimage.  He would have been aware of the parable Jesus had told about the ‘Ten Minas’ (Luke 19:11-27) – and its implications for us!  Like all those who profess to be followers of Jesus, he had been commissioned to make known the Good News of the Kingdom of God, to ‘persuade others’.

Paul knew that, just as God is able to ‘read’ each of us like a book, so all those with whom we interact – our family and loved ones, our fellow-believers and those under our pastoral care, our colleagues and acquaintances, our neighbours and social contacts – will all be ‘reading’ our lives and life-style as part of their regular intake of information that will contribute in one way or another, for good or for bad, to the moulding of their own character and behaviour.  What was true in the first century is a thousand times more applicable in our own day, because of the powerful, unsolicited, subtle and ubiquitous influence of electronic media in general, and social media in particular, on one another’s lives.

Paul will remind us, a bit later in this chapter, that ‘in Christ’ we are a whole ‘new creation’ (17), and, in the previous chapter, that “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 God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (4:6).  It is hard to imagine a more dramatic and far-reaching reality for us to take in, and come to grips with, than that the Eternal Creator who called the whole Universe into being out of nothing, with his all-powerful voice, should choose, in Christ,  to remake us in his own likeness and image – an image we lost through wilful disobedience in Adam (Genesis 1:26-3:24)!  Or that, because God has made his spotless Son to ‘become sin’ on our behalf, we might become ‘the righteousness of God’ ‘in him’ (21)!

The implications of all this are profound indeed: every part of our lives must reflect what it means to be in a right relationship with a holy God!  Understandably, Paul had asked back in 2:16, “Who is equal to such a task?”  Are we taking our discipleship as seriously as Paul did in the light of the purpose of it?  As I try to absorb all this for myself, and my own life and witness, I find it encouraging to also reflect on his comment in 4:7 – “… we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us”.

– Bruce Christian