A Test You Can’t Afford to Fail

What the Corinthians, right? We're doing the apostle Paul.

Are you really an apostle? Now he's saying, are you really Christians? And it's not out of spite that he's doing this.

Matter of fact, it's part of a very insightful strategy because if in fact they are Christians, it goes back to what we quoted last week in 1 Thessalonians 2.13.

If in fact they are Christians and they are a product of him bringing the apostolic message, and the power of God was at work in them receiving this message, well then, you know, it's vindication of his ministry that he is an apostle if they were changed by his message.

So this is brilliant in part on the Apostle Paul, but of course this is God's word trying to be codified for all time for us to get to this section in 2 Corinthians as we read it or study it and say we should all do exactly what's here.

This isn't the only New Testament text that does this.

There are plenty.

But we need to stop this morning and ask ourselves what they were having to ask themselves.

Is our profession of faith, is it genuine? You say you're a Christian, and most of us here, I would think, most of us say we're Christians.

Are we in fact Christians? Is our profession real? And I guess the real question for us as we tackle this very short text, how would we know? Because the text itself, it sets up the question.

But in the text, we don't have the details of the exam.

So we're going to have to go to the broader context of 2 Corinthians.

We're going to have to think through what is the test? What does it consist of? And we can catch that in the context of 2 Corinthians.

and the other Pauline epistles, and we'll see it throughout the Bible.

But let us start by reading the text itself.

So take your Bibles, if you're not already there, or your devices, and if you don't know where to go, you can go to esv.org, and you can just look up this text.

2 Corinthians 13, verses 5 and 6.

I'll read it from the English Standard Version, the ESV.

And we'll try and examine this text here together and utilize it the way I think the Holy Spirit would have us utilize it, and that is to apply it to ourselves.

2 Corinthians 13, verse 5.

Put your eyeballs on the text.

Here's what it says.

It says, "...examine yourselves." Now, that's not literally what it says.

If you're reading the Greek text, and some of you are, if you've taken Greek, you bring your Greek New Testament or your digital Greek New Testament, what it says sounds a little bit more like Yoda.

It says, yourselves examine.