2 Corinthians Intro: The Grace of God in Human Weakness - Tim Murray

And being here, it's, uh, it's a privilege to introduce a new series, uh, that will take us, um, [lips smack] with a few other bits and bobs thrown in through, um, into the spring.

And we're gonna be looking at, uh, the book of the New Testament called, uh, 2 Corinthians.

[lips smack] And for those of you who are perhaps newer to our church, just a quick word of explanation as to why we, um, preach through books of the Bible.

Um, because we could, of course, just pick different bits of the Bible from here, there, and everywhere every week, depending on what we wanted to talk about, and we could preach through those.

Uh, but because we believe that the Bible is the word of God, in the sense that, um, God has inspired the writings that we call the Bible, and therefore they reveal to us the truth about God and, uh, what he's like and, um, but also truth about us and our world, [lips smack] and how, uh, God relates to us.

So because it's God's word to us, part of the reason that we preach through books is so that we, uh, can encounter the whole of God's word.

The danger when you just pick your favorite bits is that you miss the awkward, difficult bits of God's word, um, but they're equally important for us to wrestle with.

[lips smack] And the reason that we preach through is that although the Bible is the word of God, it's also the word of humans who wrote these books in various different times and places and circumstances.

Um, they didn't write to 21st century Stourbridge.

[lips smack] And therefore, um, although God speaks through his word to us, it's not always obvious when we read these texts from 2,000, 3,000 years ago e- exactly how to understand them or how they land in our lives.

And that's why we preach through them.

We, you know, people put the time in [lips smack] to study and pray and reflect, um, and then teach through it, say, because we don't all have time every week to do all that work for ourselves all the time.

So that's why we, we preach through these things rather than just reading through the Bible together.

[lips smack] So 2 Corinthians, uh, is a letter [lips smack] written by the, uh, Apostle Paul.

He was one of the main leaders of the earliest churches.

He had a dramatic turnaround in his own life, so he, he went from being a Jew who persecuted the church, he thought that this was a dangerous heresy, and w- was killing Christians and trying to shut the church down.

And then he encountered Jesus for himself [lips smack] as he was on one of these, um, sort of troublemaking trips, and had his life totally changed around.

And from being someone who was trying to put Christians to death, he, uh, was called by Jesus to go and plant churches across, uh, the whole of the Mediterranean, [lips smack] which is what he did for the rest of his life until he himself was killed for his faith.

And one of the churches that he planted was in the city of Corinth.

And, um, [lips smack] having planted the church, he then wrote letters to them, and we have...

He wrote many letters to them.

Uh, there's only two that we have.

And, uh, really imaginatively, we called the first one 1 Corinthians, and the second one 2 Corinthians, and it's the second one that we're gonna be working through [lips smack] over the next six months or so.

But before we get into the text, I'd like to tell you a little bit about ancient Corinth.

Um, I'm assuming none of you have visited 2,000 years ago, so it'd be good to talk a little bit about what Corinth was like then, because that's actually really important in understanding what was going on in the church and why Paul wrote this letter, [lips smack] and what the sort of things he was struggling with.