Our subject this morning, as you will see
from the calendar, is motivating factors in Christian
service, and this is to be based on
verses 11 to 15 in that great chapter
that has been read to us, namely 2
Corinthians chapter 5.
Those of you who were present will remember
that last Lord's Day morning and evening we
were meditating upon the previous half, the first
half of this chapter, verses 1 to 10.
In the second half, the Apostle Paul deals
with two main things.
The motives that should always inspire Christian service,
and then toward the end, beginning with verse
18, particularly he comes to the message that
the Christian has been given to declare.
It's the message of reconciliation.
Now this morning we are considering the former
of these, motivating factors or motives in the
service of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Is it too much to take it for
granted that all of us here this morning
not only know our Lord Jesus Christ but
desire to please Him and to serve Him
in this life?
If you know Him not, then the message
of the last section of this chapter has
got something very, very relevant to say to
you.
It's the message that is of prime importance
to all of us, and all of us
need to hear it.
Some of us have, and if any of
us have not, let us do so today.
The Apostle Paul says that the very word
of God comes to men and women through
even his lips, and he called himself the
chiefest of sinners.
He put it like this, I beseech you
in Christ's stead, be reconciled to God.
This is a primary need in every human
life because we have all gone astray like
lost sheep.
We have wandered from Him in heart, in
emotions, in mind, in actual practice, in our
moral living, in our spiritual concepts.
On every level, in every way, we have
wandered from God and we need to be
reconciled to Him.
But now having become reconciled, what then?
Well, the Apostle Paul tells us, if I
may dare encapsulate the meaning of the passage
before us today, that there is no way
out of serving Him.
And we shall end up with this amazing
statement of his, that the love of Christ
hems us in.
If we are really reconciled to God, if
we have really seen the meaning of the
cross and have profited from it and know
that we have, then the love of Jesus
Christ hems us in, it circles us around,
and it leaves us no option.
We simply have to serve Him.
Now that is where we shall end.
Let us take the steps that the Apostle
takes in order to come to that ultimate
conclusion.
And as we do so, may I ask
you as I do myself for myself, may
the Spirit of God show me and show
you what He has to say to us
individually as well as corporately as we come
to a very singular passage such as this.
God is here speaking.
Let us attune our hearts and our minds
to what He has to say.
Now if you look at the passage, verses
11 to 15, you will see that there
are two motivating factors here.
The first comes right at the beginning and
the other comes at the end.
I shall read the first verse, and then
verses 14 and 15.
Since then we know what it is to
fear the Lord.
Now that is the first.
Since then we know what it is to
fear the Lord.
We try to persuade men.
What we are is plain to God, and
I hope it is also plain to your
conscience.
Now go down the page to verse 14,
and here we have the second to which
I have already referred.
For Christ's love compels us, because we are
convinced that one died for all, and therefore
all died.
And he died for all, that those who
live should no longer live for themselves, but
for him who died for them and was
raised again.
Two motivating factors, therefore, are here, and you
will see them exhibited on all hands at
all times in the life of the Apostle
Paul, for he lived a remarkably consistent life
of service for his Lord.
The fear of God and the love of
Christ.
And the two, not the one without the
other, not the first without the second, not
the second without the first.
The two wedded together, constrained him and sent
him out, cast him out, catapulted him into
action for his Lord, and kept him in
orbit in the will of God until at
last he lay down his life, having finished
his course.
Now let us look at these.
First of all, the fear of the Lord.
Since then we know what it is to
fear the Lord.
We try to persuade men.
Now the King James Version, great and majestic
as it is, really uses a word here
which is a little misleading.
It says, Knowing therefore the terror of the
Lord.
That is a nuance of the same word
which goes beyond the concept of fear, and
it goes beyond it in such a way
as to exaggerate it.
You see, there is a fear of God
that Christian people should not know.
They have been saved from it.
The terror of the Lord should be unknown
to the believing men and women of every
age.
Being justified by faith, we have peace with
God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
And if Jesus Christ is your Savior, you
believing men and women should never be terrorized
by the fear of God.
If you are terrorized, it means that the
blood of Jesus Christ is not allowed to
do its work.
It means that you never see the cross
of Christ standing between you and the Holy
One.
It means that something is wrong.
Jesus is not where he ought to be,
and you are not where you ought to
be.
You should know no terror.
Now Paul says that categorically.
This is not my idea.
He says that in writing to the Romans,
chapter 8 and is it the first half
of verse 15, you, he says to the
Romans, did not receive a spirit that makes
you a slave again to fear.
And the concept there is of terror.
You are not a slave to terror.
You are not frightened out of your wits
by God.
If you know him in Christ, ungodly men
and women will know that terror.
Not only in this life may they know
it, but they will certainly know it at
the end of life.
This is a very sobering note, but let
me read to you one of these challenging
passages from the book of Revelation.
Let me read to you from chapter 6,
verses 15 and 17.
There is coming a day, so we read,
when the kings of the earth, the princes,
the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every
slave and every free man, hid in caves
and among the rocks of the mountains.
You see, it is described as if it
has happened already.
They called to the mountain and the rocks,
fall on us and hide us from the
face of him who sits on the throne,
and from the wrath of the Lamb.
For the great day of their wrath has
come, and who can stand?
Now that is terror.
That is terror.
That is not Paul's subject.
It is related to it, but it is
not that kind of terrorizing fear of God
that makes you want to hide in the
rocks from the fury of his presence.
That brings us then, first of all, to
the nature of the fear which inspires Christian
service.
It will be clear from what has been
said that there is a baneful as well
as a beneficial fear.
One is our friend, the other is our
foe.
Whence does it come, this beneficial fear of
God?
Such is the majesty, such is the holiness
of God, that the knowledge of his nature
and of his being can hardly avoid creating
a fear of him in the minds of
the thoughtful.
When you think of the immensity of God
and the majesty of God, the sovereignty of
God, as well as his sanctity, if you
and I really take these things seriously, then
surely, surely, surely they make us afraid.
What may be utter terror in his enemies,
however, who know neither Jesus Christ as Savior
nor the Holy Spirit as Indweller, to change
their hearts and give them peace through Christ,
is transformed into a wholesome, awesome reverence in
the redeemed.
What is terror in the unbeliever becomes an
awesome sense of reverence in the people of
God.
In the Old Testament, for example, the people
of God were called they that feared the
Lord, they that feared the Lord.
Malachi chapter 4, for example, that is just
an illustration.
And you have exactly the same thing in
the New Testament.
And this is significant.
There is no change in the New Testament.
The proselytes from paganism to the Jewish faith
and thereafter to Christianity were called God-fearers.
We read about Cornelius that he feared God.
We read of the whole church in Antioch
that they were fearers of God.
There was a sense of reverence there when
you entered into the presence of the community.
There was another there.
There was a factor, there was an element,
there was a something about the atmosphere which
spelt the presence of one unseen by human
eyes but felt by the human spirit.
Now this wholesome fear of God which manifests
itself in reverential awe found expression and should
find expression not so much in an emotionally
crippling dread as in a moral and spiritual
respect for God and all that has to
do with God.
And of course the Bible as always is
very practical here.
It tells us how we ought to express
this.
I have no time to go through all
the details this morning but the Old Testament,
for example, is very, very specific.
You can't riddle out of this if you
really want to make sense out of it.
It tells us that first of all this
fear of God manifests itself in the keeping
of his commandments, Exodus 20, 20, 23, in
serving him, Deuteronomy 6, 13, and 24, in
listening to his voice, 1 Samuel 12, 14,
and in worshipping at his shrine, Psalm 5,
7.
Now will you notice Paul has introduced this
thread into his reasoning against the background of
verse 10 which ended the last paragraph.
And there in verse 10 he says, We
shall all have to stand before the judgment
seat of Christ, in order that we may
receive according to the deeds done in the
body, whether good or whether evil, we shall
receive exactly what is in accordance with and
consistent with our works in the body.
We shall be judged.
He is talking to Christian people.
Now this is not the judgment which determines
whether a man is saved or lost.
As I indicated last morning, Sunday morning, that
has been settled out of court.
That has been settled right here upon earth.
We do not go to the judgment day
to make peace with God.
We find him in Christ here and now,
and so we know whether we are saved
or lost.
But the issue with the meaning, the texture
of your character so-called, in terms of
1 Corinthians 13, it is what you build
upon the foundation of Christ, whether it takes
the character of straw, hay, wood, stubble, or
of the metals that not only abide through
the fire but are purified by it.
Now it is against that background of verse
10 that Paul comes in verse 11 and
says, Since then we know what it is
to fear the Lord.
We Christian people, he says, because we believe
what God has said about himself, we have
a sense of awe.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, I wonder whether
we have allowed this to be blunted a
little.
I wonder how much you and I know
this morning of awe in the presence of
God.
I know people who have what they call
a sense of awe in the presence of
great men, sometimes great men who are morally
utterly unworthy of our last or least thought,
and yet we treat them as if they
were the great beings of all creation.
What do we know about an awe in
the sense of an almighty God?
This is a salutary reminder of some of
the realities of the New Testament message.
You see, our words and our works outlive
us.
And the words we utter as well as
the works we do in the flesh mean
this.
We shall receive according to the words we
have uttered, the thoughts we have entertained, and
the works we have done.
We shall receive accordingly at the bar of
Jesus' tribunal.
Well, may we have a sense of awe
as we contemplate this.
Someone has said, nothing is more frequently opened
by mistake than a human mouth.
You know, it is true.
And that is why the psalmist prayed in
Psalm 141 verse 3, Set a watch, O
Lord, before my mouth.
Keep the door of my lips.
For every word out of place we shall
give an account, says Jesus, at the day
of judgment.
And what has been spoken in secret will
be announced on the housetops.
And the secrets of man's hearts will be
revealed.
The Lord is grieved whenever we engage in
murmuring or gossip.
He notes each sentence that comes from our
lips, and he warns us in this quotation
from the Psalms, for example, that we will
have to give account of every idle word
as well as every false deed.
You know, there is a certain nation.
I will not mention it for obvious reasons.
The nation is no worse than other nations.
But there is a nation, and in one
of its province there is a pagan habit,
a pagan practice engaged in.
There they have gods for almost every aspect
of life, gods representing them in various fields.
And in one province of the country concerned
they even have small kitchen gods whose special
duty is to overhear the conversation within the
family circle in the kitchen and in the
bedroom.
Now these gods are gods of paper, but
somebody has put the figure, the facial figure
of a god on each one.
Once a year these idols, which are made
of paper, are destroyed in a ritual of
burning.
And the point is that when they are
thus destroyed, according to this religion, their spirits
leave the gods, the images, the spirits leave
them and go to the sovereign creator of
the earth and report on everything he has
heard.
You know, they have a very peculiar usage.
Before they burn these gods and their spirits
are thereby released to go to the sovereign
creator, they smear the mouth of the gods
with honey so that they give a sweet
report.
You know, we laugh at that.
We smile at this strange custom, yet it
indicates that even pagan people have a sense
of being answerable, being answerable to an almighty
god.
They may not know, but they have a
sense that their words will come back to
them.
In that they were wrong, but they were
certainly correct in this.
They believed that an accounting will be required.
I'm sorry, they were wrong in the fact
that you cannot change the record, you cannot
sweeten the truth, you cannot cover it up
with honey.
Our God is an all-knowing God.
And whoever he was who wrote that little
verse, I think he was theologically certainly correct
when he said, guard your lips, for God
is listening.
He notes every word you say.
In the judgment books will open, all will
be reviewed that day.
The words we speak in time will echo
in eternity, and the works we perform in
time will face us before the judgment seat
of Christ.
And according to what we've said and thought
and done, we shall receive a reward or
be denied it.
To my mind, one of the greatest of
Scots theologians of the last two centuries, Dr.
James Denny, has a comment here which I
think I must pass on.
A motive so high, he says, and so
stern in its purifying power, no servant of
Christ can afford to dispense with.
We need something to suppress self-seeking, to
keep conscience vigorous, to keep the message of
reconciliation itself from degenerating into good-natured indifference,
to prohibit immoral compromises and superficial healing of
the soul's hurts, the fear of God.
Now the apostle takes it for granted, takes
it as axiomatic, that the Corinthians and himself,
that the Corinthians with himself knew something about
this.
Knowing therefore, he says, the fear of God,
we persuade men.
He brings them in with himself.
Whether it was really true of them, I
do not know.
Certainly it wasn't of some of them.
It may have been of others.
But it was certainly true of the apostle,
a realization that he was answerable for every
word he uttered, every place he went to,
everything he refused to do.
He was answerable for all.
It was with him all the time.
And he wanted to please his Lord.
And he spoke of the crown that awaited
him at the last, and not only him,
but all those who, because they had obeyed
their master, loved his appearing, looked forward to
seeing his face.
Now the consequences of knowing such a fear
of the Lord are mentioned here in these
words.
Since then we know what it is to
fear the Lord, we persuade men.
You persuade men.
Now we hear quite a lot, or we
did some years ago, about the hidden persuaders
that we encounter on the television screen.
I'm not talking about that kind of hidden
persuasion which has guile in its heart and
in its spirit.
But what I'm thinking of is the open
persuasion.
Are you a man?
Are you a woman who has a sense
of mission in life to persuade men of
the reality of God, of the infinity of
His grace, of the finality of His revelation
in His Son Jesus Christ?
Do you and I know anything of this?
Do we deem it our life's ministry to
be persuading men to leave sin and Satan
and to turn to God, to serve Him
and to love Him and to worship Him?
In vain, my dear friend, do you hold
the doctrines of grace and the teachings of
the Bible if your feet have not yet
begun to move in this way.
Something is miscarried.
In the case of a newborn babe coming
into the world, miscarriage is a tragedy.
And I know what it is to be
disappointed when a little one is forming in
the womb and you're expecting the day of
its arrival and there's a miscarriage.
Many here know that.
But I'll tell you a miscarriage which is
even more tragic than that.
It is men and women who take the
name of Jesus on their lips, who sing
His praises, who believe the doctrines, who talk
about the Bible, who even teach about it,
but they've never gone a step to seek
a soul from death.
They've never persuaded a child nor a grownup,
a Gentile nor a Jew, a black nor
a white, a rich nor a poor.
They've never persuaded anyone to leave his way
of living and turn around and become a
man and a woman of God.
I tell you that's a miscarriage.
Something's gone radically wrong.
You wonder what it is.
Now to be true to the passage here,
I have to say that these words can
be interpreted in two different ways.
It's very difficult for a preacher.
If you want to be honest with the
Word of God, it kind of knocks you
out of gear a little bit.
Which one are you going to choose?
Well, I must let you choose.
And I can tell you what the two
are, and both of them are equally possible.
Paul may well be meaning by the words,
we persuade men.
He may well be meaning that he, in
particular, is opening his mind and opening his
heart and revealing his motives, as he does
in this context, in order to silence those
who are accusing him of being a false
apostle.
Or, as we learn earlier on in this
epistle, of trying to laud it over God's
heritage.
Or later on, around chapter 3, some people
were charging him with preaching for money to
get gain.
And he answers them, he says, we are
not traffickers in the Word of God for
our own gain.
He says, I earn my own living, and
so forth.
He's answered those negatively.
Now he comes, it would appear, if this
is the right understanding of the Word, he
would come and he's saying, we persuade men
that we are honest before God.
Jesus Christ in Mark chapter 3.
Do you remember that occasion at the end
of Mark chapter 3, where his mother Mary
and the rest of the family, his brothers
and his sisters, went after him, because the
crowds were gathered around him.
And they thought that he was, beside himself,
mad.
And they thought he was just plain sailing
into the jaws of death.
And because they loved him physically, they didn't
understand him spiritually, but they loved him physically
as the member of the family, they went
to try and snatch him and get him
out.
They thought he was mad.
That's the Word.
Just like the master before him, then, the
apostle Paul is being charged with being madness
and his reply is this, well, whether you
think I'm mad or not, my madness is
for God.
And when I'm not mad and in myself
and in control of myself, it is for
your sake.
So I do nothing for my own sake
primarily, but for God's glory and for your
good, whether I'm sane or insane, in the
body or out of the body, it's for
God's glory, your good.
Can you say that about your service?
One commentator says this, that the real enthusiast
always runs the risk of seeming crazy to
lukewarm people.
Kipling tells how on a world tour at
a certain port, General Booth, founder of the
Salvation Army, boarded the ship.
Booth was seen off by a horde of
tambourine-beating Salvationists, as the record goes.
And the whole thing revolted Kipling, Kipling's fastidious
soul.
Later he got to know the general and
he told him how much he disapproved of
this kind of thing, the arrogance of it.
And the older man, the old general, put
his hand on his shoulder and he said,
young man, if I thought that I could
win one more soul for Christ by standing
on my hands and beating a tambourine with
my feet, I would learn to do it.
The real enthusiast does not care if others
think he is a fool, if his conscience
is clear before God.
You are only concerned about yourself when self
is on a throne which it should not
occupy.
But when the glory of God and the
will of God is the primary thing in
your life, you do not mind men and
women calling you a fool, for Christ's sake.
Can I come to the second explanation very
briefly?
The second possible explanation is this, and I
believe that this is probably the right one,
but as you note, I want to avoid
any dogmatism.
If we consult the book of Acts, we
shall discover that the term to persuade is
regularly employed by Luke to describe Paul's evangelistic
work.
It reflects both the determined object of his
ministry and the constant method whereby he exercised
that ministry.
Now, first of all, the object of Paul's
evangelistic efforts was clearly to persuade men, and
this brings into Paul's ministry the intellectual aspect
of things.
Paul was not just a scholar.
Now, we must rid ourselves of this concept.
Paul appealed to the conscience, too.
He does in 2 Corinthians 5 here, talking
about standing before the judgment seat of Christ.
That is an appeal to the conscience.
He would appeal also to the heart, to
the emotions, as he does later on.
The love of Christ constrains us, he says.
But Paul's basic mode of evangelism was to
convince men or to persuade men, the same
Greek word.
He declared the truth.
He reasoned from the Scriptures.
And so he would persuade men and women
of the fact that Jesus was the Christ,
that God spoke in his Son, that the
Son who spoke the Word, the truth of
God, died and rose again and was ascended
up on high, led captivity captive, sent forth
his Holy Spirit, gave gifts to men, lives
on in the church, and is King of
kings and Lord of lords.
He would insist upon that, and he would
reason it out.
You read his messages in the book of
the Acts.
So that I'm not surprised when I read
the book of the Acts, I find this
word persuasion coming up over and over and
over again.
May I give you two or three illustrations?
In Thessalonica, Acts 17.4, some of the
Jews were persuaded to join Paul and Silas,
and did a large number of, and sorry,
as did a large number of God-fearing
Greeks and not a few prominent women.
Come to Corinth in Acts 18 and verse
4.
Every Sabbath he reasoned in the synagogue, trying
to persuade Jews and Gentiles.
Come again to Acts 19.26. This time
we're in Ephesus, and Demetrius, the Ephesian silversmith
whose business was being affected by converts to
Christianity from paganism.
You see, says Demetrius, you see and hear
how this fellow has convinced and led astray
large numbers of people here in Ephesus, and
impractically the whole province of Asia.
Come again to Acts 26 and verse 28.
He's before Agrippa.
Says Agrippa to him, almost thou persuadest me
to be a Christian.
Agrippa sensed the persuasive power of Paul's logic,
as well as the pressure of the morality
that he taught.
Finally, Acts 28 and 23, Paul is in
his hired house in Rome, a prisoner.
And we read that they came in large
numbers to the place where he was staying
from morning till evening.
Now imagine this man in prison, waiting for
his death, waiting for his execution.
From morning till evening he explained and declared
to them the kingdom of God, and tried
to convince them about Jesus from the law
of Moses and from the prophets.
You see, Paul's evangelism was a persuasive evangelism.
He expounded the word of God, and he
gave a reasonable basis upon which he urged
them to believe, to have faith in God.
Now this reflects Paul's method of evangelism everywhere.
He did not simply appeal to the intellect.
May I remind you, Paul was fully aware
of the fact that mere intellectual argument can
never save a soul.
Go back to 2 Corinthians 4, just the
last chapter.
How is a man brought to Christ?
Well, he says, here it is.
It is the glory of God in the
face of Jesus Christ has to shine into
our hearts.
The God who said in the beginning, let
light shine out of darkness.
The Lord God of all creation causes the
sunshine of his glory to arise in the
face of Jesus Christ, and it penetrates our
hearts, and we are born again.
That is an act of God.
Human reasoning does not bring that about, but
in the process of evangelism, God apparently moves
on the basis of reason and of truth,
and marches into the soul of men by
the Spirit to take control, to bring life
and forgiveness.
The motivating force of the fear of God.
I have taken a lot of time with
this, and I have no time to go
on this morning, but I want to press
it home because it is the missing link
in so many of our lives.
How very tragic that so many people have
not let this sobering truth work its purifying
effect into their lives, so that in the
secret chambers of their mind they entertain thoughts
and images that would cause them the uttermost
shame if they were shown on a large
screen in public company.
People read books.
Christians read books and look at films.
They would shudder.
They would hide their faces if a God
-fearing man entered the room and saw what
they were doing, because they do not live
in the presence of a God whom they
know is holy and just, and they know
nothing of this awe and reverence for the
Holy One.
I heard the other day of a minister
that I have been speaking of is not
confined to Christians in the pew.
I heard of a minister who had read
in the paper that a very famous actor
would be performing in a local theater.
What he was doing on the stage was
not altogether wholesome, but the minister felt he
ought to try and see what this man
was doing, and he wrote him a letter,
and he asked him, and I am quoting,
Are there any side doors to the theater?
I would like to hear you, but I
do not want my people to see me
there.
And the actor sent a little curt reply
on a card.
My dear sir, the theater where I am
performing has no doors that God does not
see.
Knowing, therefore, the fear of the Lord, we
persuade men.
My good friend, has the reality of the
holiness of God ever got under your skin?
That you are afraid to sin?
Now, I cannot go on with my second
point this morning.
Your listening is very gracious.
I just want to refer it to you
before you in order for you to see
that the Bible is always complete and balanced.
It is not all the fear of God.
It says, Paul, the other main spring to
Christian action is this.
The love of Christ constrains me.
It hedges me in.
Well, Paul, how on earth do you move
from the one thought to the other in
this way, of course?
Naturally, as sinners, we have a dread of
God.
The dread of God is transformed into a
wholesome fear of God only through the cross
of Christ.
Christ died for our sins.
He took our death that we should take
his righteousness and life.
And so, says Paul, this being so, this
being so, the love of Christ in dying
for me and in bringing me to life
through his resurrection, the love of Christ, it
hedges me in.
It compels me.
It constrains me.
I can do no other.
Can you see these two motives?
The one coming from the one side and
the other from the other side.
And in the middle here is a man
who comes under the influence of the things
of God that his character is molded and
his service is determined.
And he becomes an influence for the spreading
of the gospel of the grace of God
and the honor of his name.
I don't know what you think, but I
know what I think.
Oh, I'd like to approximate this image.
How far are we really influenced either by
the fear of God or the love of
Christ?
Enough to make us cross the street, open
our lips, support those who do, pray for
the evangelization of the world, and give until
it costs.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies
of God, that you present your bodies a
living sacrifice wholly acceptable unto God, which is
your reasonable service.
Love so amazing, so divine, demands.
Of course it does.
The logic of Calvary is this, that no
man should live to himself for whom Christ
died.
No man for whom Christ died should live
for himself, but his whole experience should be
decentralized and he lives not for himself but
for the Christ who died and is risen
again.
May the Spirit of God bring us there
today.
There may be a crisis in some of
our lives.
You may not have expected a crisis on
a morning like this, a lovely summer's morning.
Perhaps you're sorry you came to Knox.
Something has disturbed you.
Before you go, my friend, I'm going to
ask you to do something.
Do something.
Acknowledge the fact that God's holiness has had
such little impact upon you.
Acknowledge the fact that the love of Christ
has hardly begun to influence you.
Will you do that?
Say the truth, of course.
Don't exaggerate.
If the love of Christ is the compelling
force along with the fear of God, then
say so.
Thank God for his grace.
But if not, acknowledge your sins.
From this day and from this morning, say
to the Lord, your God and your Father,
say to your Savior who bled for you,
I want to be what you meant me
to be.
By your grace, I will now begin.
Let us pray.
Our Heavenly Father, your word is a strange
word.
Many people think it's a dead letter.
Evidently, they haven't come under its power.
But we thank you that the Spirit who
gave us the word does, according to his
own sovereign will and purpose, take that same
word and clothe himself with it so that
it becomes a shaft from the throne to
shatter our complacency and to reform our lives.
Spirit of God, we ask that you do
in me and in us, do for me
and for all of us, do through me
and through all of us.
What do you want to do?
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.