2 Corinthians 11:1-6 (June 10)
Speaker Notes
2 Corinthians 11:1-6
11.1 I hope you will put up with me in a little foolishness. Yes, please put up with me! 2 I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. 3 But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. 4 For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.
5 I do not think I am in the least inferior to those “super-apostles.” 6 I may indeed be untrained as a speaker, but I do have knowledge. We have made this perfectly clear to you in every way.
Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, © 1979, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Downers Grove, IL. P. 198-200.
“Thus men who are not secure in Christ cast about for spiritual life-preservers with which to support their confidence, and in their frantic search they not only cling to the shreds of ability and righteousness they find in themselves, but they fix upon their race, their membership in a party, their familiar social and ecclesiastical patterns, and their culture as a means of self-recommendation. The culture is put on as though it were armor against self-doubt, and it becomes a mental straitjacket, which cleaves to the flesh and can never be removed except through comprehensive faith in the saving work of Christ.
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But if the basic principles of the dynamics of spiritual life are ignored or mislaid in all the creative innovations which are sweeping through a renewed Evangelicalism, enculturation will surely set in again. It is already visible in many areas of the Jesus movement, and it is bound to recur in places where pop psychology and experiential froth are being substituted for biblical spiritual theology. And the large continent of still-enculturated Fundamentalists in America and the great mass of the Middle-American laity are not going to be wakened from their deathly sleep in the cradle of a training code except by the preaching of the cross in its fullest dimensions. For it is not merely new methods, new insights, and clearer theologies which will advance the gospel at the close of the twentieth century. It must be a cleansing of mans spirit, and therefore a pouring out of the Holy Spirit of God.”
Mark is the Senior Pastor of Park Street Church, Boston.