Living Epistles
We had a guest speaker at church Sunday night - one of the missionaries to Argentina that our church supports. He spoke on (among other things) II Cor 3:2-3, which says:You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; being manifested that you are a letter of Christ, cared for by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
It's a beautiful idea, that we are the "living epistles" of Christ - our lives must show the Gospel of Jesus Christ as clearly as the Book of Romans, or Ephesians, or any of the other epistles.
Our speaker said (and you've probably heard this before) "Your life may be the only Bible some people ever read."
Now, I don't disagree with the things our speaker said about that passage, but as he was speaking, it occured to me that I've always missed a very important lesson in those verses. The focus of these verses is not so much on the people of the church in Corinth; rather, the focus was on Paul himself. Whose letters are the people? They are Paul's letters. They are his (as II Cor 3:1 says) "letters of commendation".
Not that Paul wrote these letters - verse three says that they were written with "the Spirit of the living God" - but rather that they are the proof of Paul's ministry, because these living epistles were "cared for by us", as Paul said.
What was Paul saying to the people of Corinth? He was saying "You want proof of our ministry? Look at your own lives! You are the proof!"
As a leader, I have to take a different perspective on these verses than just the standard "You are the only Bible some people will ever read" perspective. I have to look beyond that and ask myself: "Are the people under my care 'written in my heart'?" "Is my ministry among them and my care for them causing them to be living epistles that are 'known and read by all men'?"
That's a big responsibility. The good news is that, though we aren't adequate for the task, God is, and He makes us adequate:
Such confidence we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
(II Cor 3:4-6
Posted On Jan 10, 2006 at 6:35 AM
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