Good morning, friends. Happy Labor Memorial Day weekend. It's not Labor Day.

We don't want to go that fast through summer. Well, happy Sunday. My name is Brian. 

I'm one of the pastors here at Community Covenant Church, and I thought today we would start off with a little game. Here's how the game's going to work. I am going to sing a line in a song, and I want to see if you can fill in the blank on the next line in the song, okay? All right. 

So let's start off with this one. I get knocked down. Yes! Well done! I just felt like you were going to get that one. 

Okay. We got another one. What doesn't kill you? Yes! We're on track so far. 

All right. Last one. And the hater's going to hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.

Baby, I'm just going to shake, shake, shake, shake. Yes! You got it. We're three for three.

This is fantastic. All right. So all these songs are trying to answer something, a question that we all wrestle with. 

How do you keep going when life gets you down? When life hits hard, how do you maintain hope? That's what we're going to wrestle with today. Sometimes life hits you hard in small ways. Like, we had our van break down literally on the way down here to explore whether or not we should plant a church and move our family to Mankato, Minnesota. 

Maybe you've experienced something like that. Sometimes life hits in bigger ways. Like, when you're trying to plant a church at the beginning of a pandemic. 

And sometimes life hits hard in deep and painful ways. Like, when you get the diagnosis of a terminal disease or something along those lines where a relationship goes sour and life hits hard. And the question I want you to wrestle with today is, where are you tempted to lose heart? What's the thing for you that makes you feel like there's no hope? Well, whatever it is, in today's passage, we're going to talk about how to wrestle with things when they hit hard. 

It's part of our Under Pressure series. We're going to be in 2 Corinthians chapter 4. If you want to open your Bible up and join us today, we're going to be in the new international version. And we're walking through the second letter of the Corinthians, the letter to the Corinthians from Paul.

And we find in 2 Corinthians that both Paul and the church in Corinth are under pressure because they are experiencing conflict. They're experiencing disappointment, suffering, and relational pain. And we've talked about along the way how God can meet us when we are in those difficult things. 

We've talked about how suffering doesn't just break us, it can also shape us and deepen us and connect us more deeply to God and to other people. And we've talked about how conflict reveals our true colors, or as Paul called it, our aroma. And then we talked about how true freedom and transformation comes not just from trying harder, but from turning to Jesus. 

And today, we're going to talk about resilience. So, Paul begins chapter 4 saying, therefore, since through God's mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. So, we're going to stop here, and we're going to kind of orient ourselves, remind ourselves about what's going on. 

That therefore, whenever you see a therefore in Scripture, you always want to see what it is there for, which means we need to go back. And that therefore connects all the way back to chapter 2. Starting in verse 14, Paul begins to defend his ministry and his message of God's love to the accusers that are saying, Paul cannot be trusted. This guy switches plans. 

I mean, he told you he was going to come visit you, and then he didn't come. And then, have you noticed that Paul's not very successful? I mean, why would you want to follow somebody who isn't successful? So, he's got a lot of critics, and maybe more significantly, Paul didn't have any letters of recommendation, something that was popular among many traveling preachers during that day. And these same preachers were criticizing Paul and proclaiming a different gospel, and they argued that no one wants to follow anyone who isn't successful. 

And so, in chapter 2, Paul argues that the Corinthians are his letter of recommendation. Their lives, the very work, the things that have happened in their lives are my letter. And then in chapter 3, Paul points out that many of his critics were teaching that acceptance before God came through the observance, strict observance of the law. 

But Paul says, I'm sorry, but that only leads to death, because let's face it, I don't know anybody, and you probably don't know anybody either, that can live a perfect life. So, the law exposes our failure. Christ gives us righteousness as a gift.

So now, here in chapter 4, because God has given him this ministry of mercy and telling other people about the good news of God's love for them, even if they don't do life perfectly, well, he says, I don't have to lose heart. We don't lose heart. Even though he's being questioned, even though he's being criticized, compared, and dismissed as unsuccessful, Paul doesn't lose heart.

And if you've ever felt like you weren't good enough, like you weren't doing all the right things when you're trying to follow Jesus, maybe you can understand what Paul says when he says, we don't lose heart. So, rather than losing heart, in verse 2, he says, we renounced secret and shameful ways. We do not use deception, nor do we distort the Word of God.

On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly, we commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, something that referenced the chapter, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 

For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God, who said, let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us light, to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ. All right. 

So, for Paul, instead of losing heart and compromising like the other traveling preachers that were around, Paul doubles down on the truth. Some people might not see it that way because, as he said, the God of this age, a.k.a. Satan, has blinded them. They can't see. 

They're veiled. But here's the surprising part. Paul says that the problem isn't just an intellectual problem. 

There's a spiritual blindness that's keeping them from recognizing Jesus for who he is. Now, Paul isn't actually talking down to the people here because he had experienced that himself. He was a person who had been blind one day. 

Paul genuinely believed that Jesus was a fraud. In fact, he persecuted Christians because he thought that Jesus was a fraud. But then one day, Paul had an encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus where he was literally blinded on the way to persecute some Christians. 

And then God healed him and sent him out as a messenger of God's love and kindness to the Gentiles. The false preachers were building their own platforms. Paul says, we're not preaching ourselves. 

This is not about us. We're preaching Jesus. The messenger is never the focus. 

It's Jesus. Jesus is the one who reveals who God is to us. In other words, if you want to know who God is, look at Jesus.

And then he continues his argument. In verse 7, he says, 4. We who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake so that his life may be revealed in our mortal bodies. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. 

Again, Paul's emphasizing that Jesus is the one person who matters. Not Paul. Not all the people that are with him. 

Jesus is the one person who matters. And he does this by comparing himself to the fragile, cheap, ordinary household jar. This is like the thing that you keep your leftovers in. 

It's ordinary. Everybody has them. And then, after comparing himself to this ordinary household item that everybody had that's fragile, he affirms the points that the criticizers are making of him. 

He affirms their criticisms. He says, I am pressed. You're right. 

I am crushed. I am – sorry, I am pressed, persecuted. I am being challenged. 

But I am not crushed. I am not in despair. I am not abandoned, and I am not destroyed. 

But of those things, the most important of which he says is that followers of Jesus carry around the death of Jesus with them, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in them. It's a little strange. So, let's try to figure this one out.

Paul seems to be saying that his sufferings are part of the message. What Paul's getting at is that his life is beginning to look like the story of Jesus, the story that he's preaching, the story of death leading to life. As N.T. Wright puts it, if you want to see the resurrection at work in your life, you also need to be prepared to see the crucifixion at work in your life. 

I don't know about you, but I don't like that. I think most of us want the resurrection without the crucifixion. We want victory without vulnerability. 

We want glory without sacrifice. And so, for Paul, suffering and weakness does not prove the absence of God's power. It's often where the resurrection power becomes most clear. 

And that's why he says in verse 13, it is written, I believe, therefore, I have spoken. He's quoting a psalm. Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself.

All this is for your benefit so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God. Therefore, again, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.

For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So, we fix our eyes on what is seen. Not on what is seen, but what is unseen. 

Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. So, in this last section of chapter 4, Paul quotes that one line from Psalm 116. It might seem a little strange to us, but he's connecting his story with the psalmist's story. 

He's sort of anticipating that readers would know the whole of Psalm 116. We're not going to cover all of 116 today, but I can say this. In Psalm 116, the author is talking about how he has experienced something akin to death. 

There's been a death of a dream, the death of something in a loss, a grief, a grievance that has happened in their life. But death did not have the ultimate victory because God raised that person from the dead. So, Paul knows that even death itself cannot have the final say in his life. 

And because God raised Jesus from the dead, he can also raise you from the dead. And that's why Paul ends chapter 4 in the same way he started. We do not lose heart because even though we're experiencing hardship, there is more to the story. 

Yes, pain and suffering are sometimes very real in our lives. We feel them. We experience them. 

It hurts. But they do not have the final say. Death and suffering don't have the final say for people who follow Jesus. 

Underneath it all, God is doing something even greater. Put another way, suffering gets small when we view it through the lens of the resurrection. So, let's bring this home. 

When life hits hard and hope gets thin and you're struggling, what do we do? I think we do what Paul says in verse 18. We fix our eyes on Jesus. I don't know about you, but when I struggle, I find that typically speaking, I struggle the most when I'm focused too much on myself. 

When I become consumed with my own fears, my own frustrations, my own limitations, I lose sight of what God is doing in this world. But when I start to look out and I start to see what God is doing in your lives and in the lives of my neighbors and my friends and the people that I know, I start to see that God is doing something in this world. And it's greater than what I can do. 

And that's when I start to feel better. Not because I'm fixing the world, but because God is already at work. God is already in the business of bringing reconciliation to people and relationships and to systems and all sorts of things in this world. 

God is gracious enough, then, to invite us into that work. And we, the church, get to join in God's work of reconciling the world, and that's what we're going to head into next week as we talk about 2 Corinthians 5. We get to join in the reconciliation work that God is already doing. So, that means the real question is, well, how do we fix our eyes on Jesus? What does it look like practically for us to fix our eyes on Jesus? Well, I think we fix our eyes on Jesus through our spiritual practices, through worship, through community, through service, through generosity. 

These are the practices that help reorient our hearts toward what God is already doing in our world. Probably a good time to mention that if you are wrestling with something specific, we have fantastic prayer ministry team, and they will be available over there during the worship time, during communion. They would love to pray with you, because we're not meant to do this life alone.

Sometimes when my hope is down, I need somebody else's hope to come alongside of me and help carry me through that. That's why we do this together. And when Paul's talking to the Corinthians, he's not talking to a single individual. 

He's talking to the community of believers in Corinth. Together, we can have hope. When I'm down, you can carry me.

When you're down, I can carry you. I think it's also helpful to remind ourselves that this is not pop theology. We started with some songs today, and certainly our culture would want to remind us that we need to be resilient. 

But I think this resilience that Paul is talking about is different, because we're not dependent on ourselves. A lot of the pop theology songs are, you know, you just need to sort of pull yourselves up by your bootstraps. You need to be stronger, and then, like, you're going to be able to be okay.

In the Christian world, and in this passage, Paul actually says, your weakness is what allows others to come alongside of you. Your weakness is what allows God to show up in mighty and powerful ways. And then I don't have to pull myself up by my bootstraps. 

I don't have to somehow muster up the strength inside of me to press on and to be resilient. I can trust in you, and I can trust in God to carry me through. I remember being at one of the lowest points in my life. 

I was exhausted. I was discouraged, and I was losing perspective on life. And then I went to a missions conference. 

I started hearing stories about how God was at work around the world, doing some amazing things with people who were experiencing much worse suffering than I was. Hearing about that, hearing about the lives changed, hope breaking through darkness, something shifted in my own being. Not because my problems had somehow instantly vanished.

No, it's because I remembered that God was still at work in this world, and there was more to the story than I could see with my own eyes in my tiny little life. And maybe that's what Paul wants us to remember. What we see in our world is not the whole story.

God is still bringing resurrection life out of weakness, suffering, and pain. And that is why we never lose hope. Let's pray. 

God, thank you that you have resurrection power, that you rose from the dead. We have clear testimony of your resurrection power. And because of that resurrection power, we today can have hope, even in the most challenging situations that any of us are in. 

You are with us. You love us. We can carry each other through these seasons. 

We can be a church that carries others through these seasons of despair. We can point to you and your resurrection power. Lift us up. 

Help us to fix our eyes on you. Amen.