THE JOYFUL COMFORT OF REPENTANCE
Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on April 7, 2021 under 2021 |
Bethany Bible Church Resurrection Sunday Message; April 11, 2021 from 2 Corinthians 7:13-16
Theme: Careful confrontation and sincere repentance increases the blessings of unity in Christ.
(All Scripture is taken from The New King James Version, unless otherwise indicated).
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Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is in the life-transforming business. And the usual place in which He intends for that ongoing life-transforming work to occur is within His household of faith—the church. The relationships we have together in fellowship with Him, and the day-to-day points of contact we experience with one another, are sovereignly used by Him—under the guidance of His Holy Spirit and in accordance with His revealed word—to make us grow more and more like Himself.
Now; that process can get rather messy at times. All too often, we fail to participate in our Lord’s work toward one another in the way we should. And as a result, some people get hurt pretty badly along the way. Sometimes, some people even get hurt so badly that they quit coming to church altogether. We all know some of those stories. Sadly, some of us have ourselves been the victims of it being done wrong.
But very often, it’s done right. And when it is, the whole church gets blessed as a result.
In 2 Corinthians 7, we find a passage in which the apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian church about a time when it went ‘right’! We find his words of celebration in verses 13-16:
Therefore we have been comforted in your comfort. And we rejoiced exceedingly more for the joy of Titus, because his spirit has been refreshed by you all. For if in anything I have boasted to him about you, I am not ashamed. But as we spoke all things to you in truth, even so our boasting to Titus was found true. And his affections are greater for you as he remembers the obedience of you all, how with fear and trembling you received him. Therefore I rejoice that I have confidence in you in everything (2 Corinthians 7:13-16).
In this chapter of his letter, Paul looked back on the story of how he and his co-workers in the gospel had to confront a matter of sin within the Corinthian church family. He had to urge them to repent. And they did. And now—as we see from this passage—the end result was a mutual sense of comfort, and increased joy, and a deepening of affection for one another.
As this passage affirms to us, when it’s done rightly, careful confrontation of sin, and sincere repentance from it, actually increases the blessings of unity in the church family.
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Now; to get the full benefit of Paul’s words, we need to go back and review the story.
The Corinthians had been neglecting a very serious sin problem in their midst. There was a man who was carrying on an incestuous relationship with his own stepmother. It was a thing that would have been shocking to even the ‘anything goes’ culture of the city of Corinth. And the most grievous thing of it all was that the Corinthian Christians were not only failing to rebuke the man for it, but were even proud of how tolerant they were being about it.
Paul wrote to them about it way back in 1 Corinthians 5—urging them to, out of devotion to Christ, rebuke this man’s sinful conduct and put him outside of their fellowship until he repented. But they weren’t doing it. And so, he had to write another letter to them; a very harsh letter to them in which he boldly rebuked their sinful negligence and disobedience. He spoke the hard truth to them. But afterward, he was very concerned that he might have hurt them. So; he sent his colleague in ministry, Titus, to find out how they were.
Paul waited for a while for Titus to come back and give him a report. But Paul’s heart was so burdened that he couldn’t stand it any longer. He left a fruitful place of ministry, and went to Macedonia to find Titus. And when he found him, his heart overflowed with joy. The good news from Titus was that the Corinthian Christians had repented—and they still loved Paul.
That’s behind what we find in this chapter. Look again with me at how it unfolds. In verses 2-12, Paul wrote about the things he did—and the way the Corinthians repented—and about the comfort he experienced as a result:
Open your hearts to us. We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have cheated no one. I do not say this to condemn; for I have said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together. Great is my boldness of speech toward you, great is my boasting on your behalf. I am filled with comfort. I am exceedingly joyful in all our tribulation. For indeed, when we came to Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were troubled on every side. Outside were conflicts, inside were fears. Nevertheless God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming, but also by the consolation with which he was comforted in you, when he told us of your earnest desire, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced even more. For even if I made you sorry with my letter, I do not regret it; though I did regret it. For I perceive that the same epistle made you sorry, though only for a while. Now I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance. For you were made sorry in a godly manner, that you might suffer loss from us in nothing. For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death. For observe this very thing, that you sorrowed in a godly manner: What diligence it produced in you, what clearing of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what vehement desire, what zeal, what vindication! In all things you proved yourselves to be clear in this matter. Therefore, although I wrote to you, I did not do it for the sake of him who had done the wrong, nor for the sake of him who suffered wrong, but that our care for you in the sight of God might appear to you (vv. 2-12).
You can just imagine how badly a thing like that could have gone. The risk of hurt feelings was so great that someone else might have been tempted to not deal with it at all—to just let it go. But if Paul had just ignored the matter, then neither he, nor Titus, nor the Corinthian Christians would have experienced the joy and comfort that the Lord Jesus wanted them to have.
But look at the first thing that Paul says in verse 13; “Therefore we have been comforted in your comfort.” It was taken care of. And it went right. In fact, it went wonderfully right.
As I was discussing this passage with my wife, she told me something that related very much to it. She said that she appreciates it when I tell her that there’s something wrong in our conduct toward one another. I have a sad tendency not to say anything—to let things go—to suck it up. But she told me that it’s only when I tell her when something is not right, or that when she’s done or said something that hurt me in some way, that she then can correct it. And of course, the same is true in the other direction—that is, that when she tells me that I have done something that’s not right or that hurts her in some way, then I can make things right.
Now; we’ve both handled such things in the wrong way lots of times. But as we talked together about it, we both affirmed that—when it’s all done in the right way—we end up more in love with each other and our relationship with each other is deeper and more satisfying. There’s a wonderful and somewhat mysterious dynamic to it all. When something harmful or sinful or insensitive has been done, and the tension arises because of it, we may be tempted to draw back and withdraw from one another because of it. It’s no fun having to deal with such things. And that withdrawal only makes things worse. But when we instead intentionally commit to draw together, and confront it, and go through the hard work together, and deal with it in the right way—it’s amazing! The relationship is always better on the other side. It’s true in marriage. It’s true in friendships. It’s true in business relationships. It’s even true between nations. And it’s especially true in the household of faith—in the church.
Paul shows us that this is true by how he celebrated at the end of it all in this morning’s passage.
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Now; it’s very important that it all be done right. This whole matter of confronting and rebuking sin can be a very dangerous thing if it is done in a careless or insensitive way.
There was an assistant pastor in a church I used to attend many years ago (and it wasn’t me, by the way), who had—as it were—’discovered’ that he had the gift of confronting sin. He declared that it was his unique gift in the body of Christ. He even spoke of how happy and fulfilled it made him. But after a while, the other people in the church family weren’t sharing his enthusiasm. Eventually someone lovingly ‘confronted the confronter’. And happily, they did it right … and also happily, he himself repented. He learned—and the whole church family also learned—that confronting and rebuking sin is an important thing to do … but that it absolutely must be done right.
If you’ll look at this morning’s passage very carefully, you’ll see that, when it came to confronting this thing in the Corinthian church that needed to change, certain things needed to be in place first. Certain attitudes needed to prevail. Certain practices needed to be maintained. And so, Paul hinted at what we might call …
1. THE PRECEDING CONDITIONS.
First, when it comes to confronting and rebuking sin in our midst, there needs to be an attitude of true affection. Before we approach someone in the church family about a matter of sin, there needs to be genuine love for them. You can certainly see this in the case of the apostle Paul. He wrote all through this letter of 2 Corinthians about how deeply he loved the Corinthians and how much he had them in his affections. And the same was also true of Titus. If you’ll look at verse 15, you read that Paul told the Corinthians that Titus’ “affections are greater for you …” For those affections to be “greater”, Titus’ affections for them had to be there in the first place.
It’s hard to stress enough how important this is. To rebuke sin without an attitude of sincere love for the brother or sister being rebuked is a cruel thing to do. I read a great line the other day from a very old book. In it, an evangelist shared about how it was that he was able to have deep conversations with people about spiritual things—even when those conversations touched on sensitive matters of sin. He said, “I endeavored never to speak until I was certain that I loved.” I have been thinking about that ever since I read it—and am praying that, by God’s grace, I would take up the same commitment.
The Bible tells us in Ephesians 4:15—in the context of growing together as a church family—that we should be “speaking the truth in love”; or as it can be better translated, “truthing in love”. Speaking the truth without love can be a very brutal thing to do. May God help us, then, to make sure that we pursue an attitude of true affection for one another before we confront matters of sin.
But we must never put so much of an emphasis on the pursuit of affection and love that we fail to speak the truth when we should. It’s true that we need to speak in love … but it also must be ‘the truth in love’ that we absolutely need to speak. Truth without love is brutality; but love without truth is hypocrisy. And so, another thing that we need to have as a preceding condition toward one another is a courageous commitment to speak the truth. We see this also hinted at in this passage. Paul told the Corinthians in verse 14, “… we spoke all things to you in truth …” That was his ongoing policy toward them; and they knew that they could count on it from him.
There is a remarkable commandment given to God’s people in Leviticus 19:17; and it’s something that we need to take to heart. God told His people; “You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin because of him” (Leviticus 19:17). Just think of that! We sometimes think that we’re being ‘loving’ when we don’t point out an ongoing habit of sin in the life of our brother or sister in Christ. But God says that to refuse to tell them the truth about their sin—to withhold the truth from them, and not to rebuke it, and to simply ‘put up with it’ or ‘ignore it’—is actually to hate them. There are times when the sincerest and truest expression of love is to sit someone down, open the Bible, show them what God says to do, and call them to repentance and obedience. When it comes to rebuking sin within our midst, that commitment to courageously tell one another the truth from God about our sin is something that absolutely must be in place.
And finally, there needs to be a confident trust in the Holy Spirit’s work. I’ll admit that we don’t find that stated explicitly in this passage; but I do believe it is strongly implied in it. We see it implied in what Paul said in verse 14; “… our boasting to Titus was found true …”; and also in what he said in verse 16; “I have confidence in you in everything.” Why could he have such confidence in the Corinthians? Why could he ‘boast’ to Titus about them—even though they had struggled with sin? It’s because his confidence was ultimately not found in them, but rather in the Holy Spirit who was at work in them.
Back in 1 Corinthians 1:4-9—back before he ever wrote a single word of correction to them—the apostle Paul affirmed his confidence in God toward them. He said;
I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given to you by Christ Jesus, that you were enriched in everything by Him in all utterance and all knowledge, even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, so that you come short in no gift, eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you to the end, that you may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord (1 Corinthians 1:4-9).
How could Paul be so confident in speaking the truth in love to the Corinthians—and even in rebuking the sin in them and calling them to repentance? It was because God the Holy Spirit was at work in them; and the Holy Spirit is faithful to sanctify those who have been redeemed in Christ. It’s vital, then, that we cultivate a confident trust in the work of the Holy Spirit. We may do or say things wrongly in the process of lovingly confronting one another. But the Holy Spirit is sovereign; and we can trust Him to use faithfully even what we may say or do wrongly.
I remember reading long ago from a Christian counselor as he wrote about this whole matter of confronting sin within the church family. He knew that most Christians felt hesitant about this important work—that they were afraid that they might hurt people in the process. But he said to just remember three things: that if we (1) sincerely love them, and (2) speak the truth to them from the Scripture, and (3) always do so in the power of the Holy Spirit, then we can’t hurt them. We can only do them good.
That’s what the apostle Paul is hinting at to us in this passage.
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So then; those are three ‘preceding conditions’ that need to be a part of the life of our church. We need to cultivate an attitude of sincere affection for one another, a courageous commitment to telling the truth to one another, and a confident reliance on the Holy Spirit to work in one another. If those things are in place, we can safely confront sin in one another’s life and encourage one another toward repentance.
That was Paul’s experience with respect to the Corinthians. By God’s grace, it was done right. And look again at this passage to see …
2. THE BLESSED RESULTS.
This whole passage is—in fact—a celebration of the results that came from doing it right. First, we see that there was a sharing of comfort. The Corinthians felt comforted by Paul after having gone through the hard process of rebuke and repentance; and Paul felt comforted by them. As he puts it in verse 13, “Therefore we have been comforted in your comfort.” In fact, Titus also was comforted. As Paul wrote in verses 6-7;
Nevertheless God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming, but also by the consolation with which he was comforted in you, when he told us of your earnest desire, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced even more (vv. 6-7).
We are often hesitant to deal with the hard work of rebuke and confrontation with one another. It hurts. But what we don’t always remember is that God Himself is the ever-present source of all comfort; and we don’t always appreciate how He is able to bring even greater comfort on the other side of the hard times—if we trust Him, do things right, and keep at it. That mutual experience of comfort is worth it all.
Another result is a refreshment of spirit. In verse 13, Paul wrote, “And we rejoiced exceedingly more for the joy of Titus, because his spirit has been refreshed by you all”.
That word “refreshed” is an interesting one. It can be translated by the idea of ‘rest’ or ‘ease’. Titus may have had reason to be ill-at-ease; because he himself went to the Corinthians not knowing what he would find. Back in 1 Corinthians 16:10-11, Paul had written to the Corinthians about another minister and said,
And if Timothy comes, see that he may be with you without fear; for he does the work of the Lord, as I also do. Therefore let no one despise him. But send him on his journey in peace, that he may come to me; for I am waiting for him with the brethren (1 Corinthians 16:10-11).
The Corinthians were sometimes ornery; and perhaps Titus had concerns that he would also be rejected by them—especially since he was coming to help deal with a matter of sin. But instead, his spirit was ‘refreshed’ by them, and ‘rested’, and ‘put at ease’. What a refreshment it is when those hard experiences end up going well—and encouraging our spirits!
There was also a validation of boasting. Paul had perhaps spoken words of reassurance and encouragement to Titus; telling him, “Go to the Corinthian believers. Find out how they are. Let’s trust together that the Holy Spirit has been at work in them, and that they will have repented, and are going to receive you well.” That, in fact, was what happened. And as Paul was able to write in verse 14; “For if in anything I have boasted to him about you, I am not ashamed. But as we spoke all things to you in truth, even so our boasting to Titus was found true” (v. 14).
Paul had been careful to speak the truth to the Corinthians—even if they didn’t want to hear it. And now, the truth of what he had said to Titus had been validated. In 1 Corinthians 13:7, it says that love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things …” And what a happy thing it is when our loving expectations of one another prove true!
Paul said that, as a result of it all, there was an increase of affection. There had already been a sincere affection for the Corinthians on the part Titus; but after it was all over—in verse 15—Paul affirms that “his affections are greater for you” (v. 15). They increased!
The apostle John once wrote to a brother in Christ and said,
For I rejoiced greatly when brethren came and testified of the truth that is in you, just as you walk in the truth. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth (3 John 3-4).
If we truly love one another in Jesus, there can be no greater joy for us than to see one another become more devoted to Jesus and walk with Him in truth. Our increased devotion to Jesus means our ultimate happiness in Him; and when we see that increased devotion in one another—as shown through sincere repentance—then it increases our affection for each other.
There’s also the blessing of a manifestation of obedience. When we show forth clear repentance in response to loving rebuke, it puts objective, practical, measurable content to our devotion. Paul said, in verse 15, that Titus’ affection for the Corinthians grew, “as he remembers the obedience of you all, how with fear and trembling you received him” (v. 15).
That ‘fear and trembling’ wasn’t because of Titus. It wasn’t even because of Paul. It was because of the realization of the deep seriousness of their sin before God, and their need to earnestly turn away from it. It showed itself—as Paul put it in verse 11—in the fact
that you sorrowed in a godly manner: What diligence it produced in you, what clearing of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what vehement desire, what zeal, what vindication! In all things you proved yourselves to be clear in this matter (v. 11).
And finally, a blessed result that came from it all was a joyful celebration. Paul said in verse 13 that “we rejoiced exceedingly more”. That is, he not only rejoiced; and he not only rejoiced exceedingly, but he rejoiced exceedingly more! And I love it that he said “we”. He and Titus and their co-ministers ‘super-over-the-top rejoiced’! As he put it in verse 16, “Therefore I rejoice that I have confidence in you in everything.” He knew that whatever may lay ahead—whatever they may yet need to do to walk in increased faithfulness to Christ—whatever it may be that Paul would need to exhort them to do—he could have confidence that they would do it.
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Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is in the life-transforming business. And this is how He ordinarily does it. May we—by His grace—participate together in this good work of His. And may we learn to do it right.
It’s wonderfully worth it!
EA
