2 CORINTHIANS 11

Heart Issues
Boasting is not good, but there is a time and a place. Paul boasts out of humility and not to build up his pride in himself. He lets everyone know that by the grace of God he is the man that he is. It is good to boast in the Lord for God should be boasted about. He is the all-powerful, all-knowing God. I want to always boast in the Lord and in my weakness for that is where the Lord shows up to fill in the gaps. I even hope that my strengths will not be so strong that I don’t find myself weak there in dependence upon the Lord. I am challenged by Paul’s heart today. He loves the churches that he preached to. I want to love my students as much as he loved his churches. I want to present them to Christ pure and pleasing to Him. The Word is the only thing that can keep them pure so I must exalt the Word of God high above myself and let God work on their hearts. Finally, to see all that Paul went through really motivates me to keep pushing outside my comfort zone. I can so easily say I don’t have that much of a comfort zone, and mine is pretty wide, but I do the crazy things still worrying about what people think sometimes. I want to only care about the opinion of the Lord and give Him everything. I want to surrender to Him and allow Him to work through me through the Holy Spirit.

Notes
-Paul’s heart in taking care of the Corinthian church is amazing. He compares it to a wedding and helping to keep the bride pure for her husband. Christ is worthy of our pure and sincere devotion, but the super-apostles were pulling them away and turning them to a different gospel. Paul was jealous for them with a godly jealousy. He knew He was to continue in encouraging them and would be distraught had they turned to the super-apostles and ignored him.
-Paul wanted to preach to them free of charge so that their response would be complete. He did not want them to be hindered by anything, but now that they are following the Lord they should be sharing in supporting Him.
-Masquerading means to go about with a mask on and pretend you are something/someone else. The greatest deceit for Satan would not be to show up as scary looking or revolting, but as a servant of righteousness or as an angel of light. The people who turned more people away from God were the Pharisees and Sadducees, not the prostitute and the tax collector.
-Paul did not exploit them as others had. He is now going to boast to again reclaim their allegiance. He shows that boasting is not of the Lord, but the only reason he is doing it is because others had and he needed to defend his apostleship once more.
-Paul’s credentials as apostle are astounding and unmatched by any other. As we know through Galatians 1 and Philippians 3 he had met all of the Jewish requirements to be a top leader. Here we see all of the sufferings of Paul and it stops you in awe of his passion and zeal for the Lord. The forty lashes minus one is the same that Jesus went through. Five times he received that and then three times he was beaten with rods. After being stoned he was left for dead and went back into the city to preach more. He had been on the run and in danger everywhere he went. My favorite thing about this passage is to see his true heart. He was most concerned not with his own suffering, but with the churches that he cared for so deeply. He longed that they would know Jesus better and he felt their pain when they fell into sin.