Paul's Defense of His Ministry
1By the meekness and gentleness of Christ, I appeal to you—I, Paul, who am "timid" when face to face with you, but "bold" when away! 2I beg you that when I come I may not have to be as bold as I expect to be toward some people who think that we live by the standards of this world. 3For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 6And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete.
7You are looking only on the surface of things. If anyone is confident that he belongs to Christ, he should consider again that we belong to Christ just as much as he. 8For even if I boast somewhat freely about the authority the Lord gave us for building you up rather than pulling you down, I will not be ashamed of it. 9I do not want to seem to be trying to frighten you with my letters. 10For some say, "His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing." 11Such people should realize that what we are in our letters when we are absent, we will be in our actions when we are present.
Dig Deeper
The young teacher was rather quiet and unassuming. He didn’t really care to engage his students in discipline if he didn’t have to. He much preferred to lay down the rules of the class quietly and without much fanfare. That way when he was actually in class with the students, he could get down to the business of teaching and enjoying the topic of the class. Most of the students greatly enjoyed the class and the teacher, but one year a couple of students came in and began to challenge the young man. They took his good nature and quiet way for weakness and begin to attempt to convince other students that the teacher was weak and wasn’t a good teacher like they had all thought.
A few days later, a situation happened outside of the school when a couple of non-students came up to beat up a current student in the teacher’s class. The teacher happened to be outside and ran right into the middle of a clear gang attack. He immediately and swiftly dealt with the situation and actually scared the assailants away. The next day in class things were different. The students that had questioned the teacher because of his demeanor, suddenly realized that there was much more to him than they had thought. What he had down outside of the class, he was surely able to do inside of it if need be, was their new and correct line of reasoning.
What the students discovered on their own, Paul tells his Corinthian detractors outright. They have accused him of being timid and bold in person, but bold in his letters. This was an act of cowardice in their minds. By this point, Paul in comfortable in the knowledge that he has the hearts and support of the majority of the Corinthian congregation. In a sense, now, he turns his attention towards his detractors and those that might still be swayed by them.
Paul begins by appealing to the meekness and gentleness of Christ. In doing so he accomplished two things. First, because he has claimed all along to be a minister in the same manner of Christ, he sets up the problem that if he is weak, then so was Christ. Second, was the fact that everyone at that time understood that Christ was meek and gentle when appropriate, but he was also fierce and bold when he had to be. Paul’s message is that as Christ was, so am I as His apostle. Paul does not want to have to be that way when comes, but he will. In essence, this passage is all about Paul balancing gentleness and meekness with the type of boldness that can tear down the strongholds of the world.
The world of Paul’s day was full of religions, philosophies, and wisdom from which to choose. What Paul is offering is decidedly not just another alternative to those but an entirely new way of life. A manner of living that uses a whole different set of weapons because it is part of an entirely different reality. Paul firmly believed that reality had been revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and because of that the task of every Christian is to demolish the strongholds of the world. This is an allusion to Proverbs 21:22, where the wise man goes up against strong cities and tears down the stronghold in which the ungodly trusted. When put side-by-side with worldly philosophies, the reality of the Messiah shows them to be mere pretenders. That doesn’t mean, however, that every position other than true Christianity is devoid of any truth. All truth is God’s truth. We must be clear that there is no truth that is so great that it cannot be perverted by man’s pride, nor is there any morsel or tidbit of human insight, truth, or reality that cannot be taken into service to the true King of the world. This is what Paul means when he says to take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. This is precisely what he was doing when he did things like take Caesar’s title, Lord and Savior, and applied it to Christ, or even in his speech that was inspired by the altar to an unknown god in Athens. He was taking small glimmers of reality and turning them over to the obedience of the true King. We share in this task even today. It is our job to find the small glimmers of truth that man has perverted because of our own pride and turn them back over in obedience to Jesus, the Messiah and King of the world.
If anyone claims to be an apostle belonging to Christ, as Paul’s opponents did (he will soon pick up that thread and demonstrate that they are certainly not true apostles), then they need to reconsider things. They have been looking at worldly things and have convinced others in Corinth to do the same. Paul is doing something that those who are caught up in worldly things don’t understand. Human pride has perverted things like boasting and boldness, but Paul will make those very things captive and use them for the glory of God. He will boast about the authority the Lord has given him to build up and expand the Kingdom of God.
In the same vein, he hasn’t used boldness in his letters because he is a coward. Quite the contrary. He has used painful letters in an effort to avoid painful visits. He was not trying to use boldness in a human way, in order to frighten or intimidate them. No, he was using godly boldness for their own good. Again, his opponents had judged him according to human standards, claiming that he was weighty and forceful in letters but unimpressive in stature and a poor speaker in person. Paul can be bold in person, but even then it won’t come through vehicles of human pride like an impressive stature and forceful speaking skills. His boldness, force, and authority will come through in his godly actions when he arrives. We certainly can learn both from Paul’s reluctance to use his authority and boldness, and his godly willingness to when needed.
Certainly we can learn from and be challenged by Paul’s deep commitment to acting only in the best interests of others. Even in situations where we might have expected Paul’s ego or hurt feelings to get the best of him, he still acted in the interest of others. Paul did not let his emotions or feelings determine how he acted but he acted out of love for God and God’s people in such a way that he was driven to constantly put their interests ahead of his own. This is a stiff challenge for those of us who have grown up in such a me-first culture. Surely, however, we called to put the interests of others ahead of our own every bit as much as Paul and his contemporaries were.
Devotional Thought
Paul was willing and able to take human things like boldness and boasting and turn them over to Christ in obedience. What are ways that you can take the things of the world and turn them over to the Lord that you have not yet thought of?
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