Ever feel like you are in over your head?
Maybe you are helping someone and they come to you with some pretty heavy stuff. How do we help them? What makes us so special that we know everything?
2 Cor 2:16-17 says it plainly “Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissions by God in the sight of God we speak in Christ.”
We are not sufficient. But if you are being sincere and honest, you are speaking not in yourself, but you are speaking in Christ.
…and then farther down…in 3:4-6:
Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
(2 Corinthians 3:4-6 ESV)
It’s not us. It’s only thru Christ, our sufficiency is Christ’s sufficiency. He makes us competent to help others. After all, we are just helping to lead them to the truth in Christ anyway, we aren’t leading them towards our own ideas of what is right. And, as that verse says at the end, we aren’t giving life anyway – only HE can, the Spirit gives life. He gives life thru the new covenant, not the old law, but the new covenant of Jesus Christ. (1 Cor 11:25). Jesus paid the enormous price of my sin and gave me right standing with God (justification) through the perfect life he lived. Our jobs are to be ministers of the new covenant of reconciliation between man and God thru Jesus Christ.
We are just ordinary non-descript clay jars. 4:7 says “But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.”
Our treasure is the light of the Gospel (4:6) that he has shown in our hearts in the knowledge of Jesus, as revealed in his Word.
Mike Ruel 