Gaining Perspective Jamie Maciejewski
Series: Comfort and Clarity July 21, 2024
2 Corinthians 3:1-18
You’ll be happy to know, even with Pastor Don on vacation, you’ve got more mail! Letters in the box! And this time, youare the letters! (It’s a big mail box…)
I love letters. They are such welcome touches from people I love. My longest and dearest friend Kelly and I haven’t lived near one another since George and I moved here in 2001. A letter reconnects us immediately, even if many weeks have passed since the last one. Phone calls are wonderful, but you can linger over a letter. I reread it, hear my friend’s voice as though we were sitting together with a cup of tea. The struggles and joys leap off the digital paper.
When Paul tells the Corinthians that they are letters written on his heart, can’t you just hear the tenderness in his voice? These are dear friends; they share a history together. They’ve been through ups and downs. We’ve explored some of that history this year. But there’s more to it than letters shared in friendship. These are letters that belong to Christ. They weren’t penned on parchment; no keyboard was involved. These letters were written with the Spirit of the living God on human hearts (2 Cor 3:3, NLT). And Paul was the mailman (v. 3)! As verse 3 says, these letters show “the result of our ministry among you.”
As I was studying this chapter, I thought about Pastor Don. Did you ever think that each of us is a letter on his heart? A letter belonging to Christ, written by the Spirit of the living God, the evidence of Pastor Don’s ministry among us. That’s each of us! We’re Pastor’s mail!
The Apostle Paul doesn’t just pull this image of letters on hearts out of thin air. He’s using some very interesting imagery from three of our Old Testament friends, Moses, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. These are three of Israel’s great prophets.
First, Moses. God handed Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. God had personally carved the commandments into tablets of stone. The commandments are the core of what we call the “old covenant.” God gave the Israelites the roadmap for following him, the requirements they needed to do if God was going to live with them. It was a lot of work for imperfect human beings to follow God’s Law. They failed regularly and often spectacularly. When Paul says the Corinthians are not letters written on tablets of stone, he’s thinking of the old covenant.
Second OT image, the prophet Jeremiah. Chapter 31 is the only spot in the OT to mention a new covenant taking the place of the old Moses covenant. Here’s what Jeremiah says:
“The day is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife,” says the Lord.
“But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days,” says the Lord. “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their relatives, saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’ For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know me already,” says the Lord. “And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.” (Jer 31:31-34, NLT)
Paul is clearly referencing this passage in Jeremiah 31 when he speaks of a letter inscribed by God on human hearts, one that is evidence of the new covenant, “not of written laws, but of the Spirit” (v. 6).
Third OT image, the prophet Ezekiel. He says God will remove the stone hearts from his people and give them hearts of flesh. (Eze 11:19, 36:26) Paul is alluding to these passages in Ezekiel when he says the Corinthians are not written on hearts of stone.
Paul isn’t putting down the old covenant. He talks for several verses about how glorious it was, so glorious that Moses’ face would be shining too brightly for other people to even look at him. But Paul is transparent about the challenges of that old covenant: it resulted in death. People simply couldn’t do everything without failing. When it comes to following rules, even such important ones as the Ten Commandments, sooner or later you are going to mess up.
The good news is that now there’s a new covenant written inside us. When we say Yes to God, we begin to look differently, not because we start following rules and commandments, but because the Spirit of the living God is writing on our hearts. Whether or not we can see the letter the Spirit is writing in us, we can be confident it’s being written. Paul says everyone else can see it! (v. 2) Do you see it in your neighbor? We are companion on our Christian pilgrimage, and each one of us is a letter belonging to Christ, written by the Spirit of the living God. Doesn’t it make you want to read the mail all around you?
Just like savoring a letter from a close friend, we can savor the letter that each of us is. We are all the evidence of God’s work among us, through Pastor Don and others who have invested time and prayer in us. Pastor Don’s got mail!
As you invest yourself in others in the name of Jesus, then you likely have mail, too. Maybe, though, you question whether there are any letters out there that you helped deliver. Any human letters that serve as evidence you have touched someone’s life. I think it’s fair to assume that most of us know that feeling. As I was preparing to speak, as usual, I kept tripping over my own inadequacies. But Paul reminds us: “It is not that we think we are qualified to do anything on our own. Our qualification comes from God.” (3:5)
A seminary professor encouraged us to look at the text and ask two questions. What does God do and what do we do? Here’s what I see in 2 Corinthians 3: God writes the letters on the new hearts that he gives us (v. 3). God qualifies us to minister to others (v. 5). God gives us life (v. 6). God sets us right with him (v. 9). God takes away the blinders – the veil – on our hearts and minds (vv. 14, 16). And God transforms us into the image of Christ, from one degree of glory to another (v. 18).
What do we do in this text? Deliver letters (v. 3). Trust God (v. 12). Turn to the Lord (v. 16). That’s it; three things. Deliver letters; trust God; turn to the Lord. God does all the work. Everything we do is a response to what God does first. We deliver letters that the Spirit of the living God writes. We trust the God who gives us great hope. We turn to the Lord who is always present to us, even when we forget, even when we turn to chase lesser gods. The work is all God’s. He is changing us from the inside out.
The Lord, who is the Spirit, makes us more and more like Christ. It’s not us that does it. The work God does to make us more like our Lord is incremental. One translation puts it this way: we are being “transformed…from one degree of glory to the next” (v. 18, CEB).
This is the amazing promise:
For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord—who is the Spirit—makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image. (vv. 17-18)
We are God’s work, letters belonging to Christ, written by the Spirit of the living God, being transformed gradually but very surely to be more like him. No self-improvement project, no little-g god, can hold a candle.