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2 Corinthians 10:15  We do not boast beyond limit in the labours of others. But our hope is that as your faith increases, our area of influence among you may be greatly enlarged, …

We need to recognise the deep humility embedded in Pau’s character to appreciate the point he is making here to the Church at Corinth.

He had been the proud, authoritarian Pharisee who was determined to stamp out the growing ‘plague’ of the followers of Jesus who were proclaiming a ‘Gospel’ [Good News] of getting into a right relationship with God ‘by grace through faith alone’ and not by keeping the Law of Moses [good works] as he had spent his life trying to do.  This inbuilt self-righteous character had been knocked out of him on the road to Damascus when he came face to face with the Risen Christ!  He was well aware of the magnitude of the change this had brought about to his basic mindset when he wrote earlier in this letter to Corinth: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.  But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the all-surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Corinthians 4:6-7)  He was now just a humble servant of the Gospel himself, a slave of the Lord Jesus Christ, commissioned by Christ as an ‘Apostle’ to take this wonderful, liberating, life-giving message to a world of ‘lost sinners’ among whom he now saw himself as the ‘foremost’ (1 Timothy 1:15)!

However, the endemic polytheistic, humanistic culture of Corinth, which sadly infected the Church, produced a mindset that was unable (or perhaps just unwilling) to relate to the ‘new’ Paul, and which therefore put him in a sort of ‘popularity’ competition with other ‘influencers’ in Corinth and ‘rated’ him well down on the ‘leaderboard’ (sorry to mix the metaphors!).  It is part of the fallen nature we all have, when someone is telling us what we don’t want to hear, to attribute their ‘crazy’ ideas to a deficiency in their personality.  But the humble servant-heart of the ‘new’ Paul could see this clearly, and so he was willing to submit to the Sovereignty of God and wait patiently for the Holy Spirit to do his sanctifying work and ‘increase their faith’ and enable them to change and see things from Paul’s perspective.

Can we learn from the humble, wise trusting apostle to be patient with, and prayerful for, people with whom we are sharing the Good News, but who seem slow in allowing the ‘penny to drop’, to use another metaphor?

Paul also acknowledges that there were others higher up on the Corinthian ‘influencers’ leaderboard whom God was using to bring people to Christ!  Are we also prepared to accept that, as the Holy Spirit does his creative ‘treasure’-revealing work of ‘shining in their hearts to give them the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’, he is also using many other ‘jars of clay’ to parcipitate in the process, so that everyone will know that ‘the all-surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.’?

“Should nothing of our efforts stand, no legacy survive, unless the Lord does raise the house in vain its builders strive.  To you who boast tomorrow’s gain, tell me what is your life? A mist that vanishes at dawn – All glory be to Christ!  All glory be to Christ our King!  All glory be to Christ!  His rule and reign we’ll ever sing: All glory be to Christ!”

– Bruce Christian