Footsteps #221

¹¹ Dear brothers and sisters,^[c] I close my letter with these last words: Be joyful. Grow to maturity. Encourage each other. Live in harmony and peace. Then the God of love and peace will be with you. ¹² Greet each other with a sacred kiss. ¹³ All of God’s people here send you their greetings.^14 [d]May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” NLT (2Cor.13:11-14)

Corinthians concluded. 2Cor.13:11-14 contains Paul’s usual postscripts. The third benediction of v14 is theologically rich, mentioning all three persons of the Trinity. The grace of Jesus Christ is that which prompted Him to surrender the riches of His glory and give His life for eternal security. The love of God is a love so great that it was extended to sinners and to those who are His enemies. The fellowship of the Holy Spirit is that which draws the hearts of all of God’s children toward one another and makes true unity possible. 

We don’t know how the Corinthians responded, but we do know that Paul made that third visit to Corinth. He stayed three months and during that time wrote his greatest work, the letter to the Romans. At that time, he was also seriously considering a missionary trip to Spain (Rom.15:28,29). There is at least a strong possibility that the church took Paul’s message to heart. How about us? It is one thing to understand what Christ’s deliverance means; it is quite another to see this worked out in our lives with depth and reality and to see its moral splendour in the life of a church. That is what makes the Gospel so attractive! The evangelical Church today, generally, is not very inspiring in this regard. Much of it, instead, is replete with tricks, theatrics, gadgets, gimmicks, showmanship, and marketing ploys as it shamelessly adapts itself to our emptied out, blinded, pagan and postmodern world. It is supporting a massive commercial enterprise of Christian products, it is filling the airways and stuffing postal boxes, and it is always begging for money to fuel one entrepreneurial scheme after another, but it is not always morally resplendent. It needs a revival of that moral vision and a recovery of that primitive godliness. There is too little about the church that does not speak of the holiness of God. Without the vision for and reality of this holiness, the Gospel becomes trivialized, life loses its depth, God becomes transformed into a product to be sold, faith into a recreational activity to be done, and the Church into a club for the like-minded.