Justin Burge, Executive Director of Campus Collective Christian Ministries, uses the story of David defeating Goliath to inspire us to think about the stories people are telling us about ourselves, how those affect us, and how to sift through them to find the story God is telling us.
Scripture: 1 Samuel 17
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We are in the 5th week of a 6 week sermon series through 2 Corinthians, talking about suffering—everyone’s favorite. Up to now, we have reflected on how we go through our own hardship and where God is in the midst of that. Today, we will see Paul inviting the Corinthians to help him alleviate the suffering of a different church, meaning we get to talk about everyone’s other favorite topic: money. Paul invites us to reflect on all that God has already given to us through Christ who is the cornerstone of our faith and all creation, to invite us to be joined together in serving one another.
2 Corinthians 5:14-21 is the culmination of what Paul has been talking about with regards to suffering and our faith. Everyone suffers, but that suffering further connects us with Jesus who joined us in our pain, that God invites us to speak our pain to him, and that in spite of what we are going through, Jesus really does love us. Today, with all that building, Paul declares: 16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! Christ’s comforting love in our lives does not only fill us with hope, it urges us on to see other people differently. As Heaven and earth overlap in the Kingdom of God, we anticipate the coming fulfillment of God’s presence with not only ourselves, but with others.
Paul tells us “the Love of Christ urges us on.” This does not mean that OUR love of Jesus compels us to work harder. It is a reminder that the abundant, gracious love that Jesus has for us holds us together. The Church, then, can live that out together and help one another feel that love.
We’re in the middle of a 6-week study through 2 Corinthians, a book that Paul wrote detailing his pain and suffering in spreading the Gospel. Paul writes about what we all know: there are times when life is hard. But latent in his letter is a constant hope. Hope that God is with us, and that it will not always be this way.
In his book, Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright writes, “Our present experience even with our Christian experience, is incomplete. But in Christ we have heard the complete tune; we know now that it sounds like and that we shall one day sing it with him. Our present experience, with all its incompleteness, is meant to point us to the fact that we will one day wake up and arise from sleep. That, after all, is what resurrection is about.”
Paul says that death is always at work in us, and that it is for Jesus’ sake. What does it mean for us to suffer with and For Jesus?
On Trinity Sunday, we are reminded that we don’t have to live in fear of our Triune God.