2 Corinthians 3:1-6 (NIV)
Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
Such confidence we have through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
To some, Paul’s previous paragraph might sound like boasting. But it is a fact that Paul himself started the Church at Corinth. He was the first one to bring the gospel to Macedonia and Achaia (Greece).
But there is more. Paul had not come with a new philosophy for the Corinthians to believe. And he had not come with a new or more intensive law for them to follow. Instead, he had come with the life-giving, soul-saving gospel of Jesus. And when the Corinthians received it and believed, they were made spiritually alive, and had been transformed by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
When the wandering teachers and “apostles” came into a new community, they frequently brought letters of recommendation from the places they had been before, testimonials of how their work had been effective in other places. But, as Paul points out, he needed no letter of recommendation to the Corinthians. During the year and a half that he had worked in Corinth, they saw for themselves the power of God at work in him, and they experienced that power in their own lives. They themselves were Paul’s letter of recommendation, the testimony of his effectiveness.
But Paul is also quick to testify that this competence did not come from his own hard work and study (although he definitely had both of those to his credit!). Instead, it was solely due to the power of the Holy Spirit which was working in him and through him. That divine power had given spiritual force to his words and had driven them home directly into the heart of the Corinthians.
Many of those who were talking Paul down had a lot of education and impressive credentials. They were also powerful speakers, able to use their rhetorical skills to persuade others. But neither of those were a substitute for the divine power that flowed through Paul.
Father, our tendency these days is to look up to theologians and teachers, and even evangelists, with impressive credentials from illustrious universities. Or we prefer to follow those who speak in polished phrases that sound good to our ears. But none of those things qualified people to be preachers or teachers, evangelists or apostles in Your early Church. Instead, it was Your divine power flowing affectively through them, and their fruit, not merely of signs and wonders, but of lives completely transformed by faith in Jesus and by the Holy Spirit bringing true life to their hearts. Lord, help us to not be so easily impressed by the qualifications of our leaders, but to look at the fruit of their lives, so that we are not misled by them, but so that we are built up in the faith, and thoroughly equipped for every good work. Amen.
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