Tag: 2 corinthians

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Already into Week 2

We’ve already gone through our first week of the third quarter, and with each week we’re distancing ourselves more from that midway point. So I guess we can classify ourselves as over the hill and we’ll just gather momentum from here on out.

We finish out Corinthians and continue into Jeremiah this week, with a brief break from the Psalms.

Before we completely cut ourselves off from last week, here’s a short paragraph I wrote back in school about 2 Corinthians 4, which is a bit of a strange passage about carrying around death in our lives. I share this partly because whenever I can use what I did in school after graduation, I feel like all that money was well spent. I hope my one paragraph is a tiny bit helpful, rather than more confusing. If it is the latter, I’ll use the excuse that I wrote it years ago.

2 Corinthians 4:5-6, 10
For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.

The Church is not as some would see it as a holy body, a diamond amongst the rest of the rough world.  It is not the pinnacle of humanity, instead from it is the best of human possibility. It is to be the pulpit from which the living Word of God is proclaimed. It is both pit and pinnacle; pit because it is human, pinnacle because it is a place of recognition of our guilt and of God’s mercy. The Church carries death, so that Christ’s life may be revealed.

–Me, thesis for some theology class discussion

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Something New for Year in the Bible

So I was talking with someone this morning in my small group about scripture memorization. It seems like that is something many do when we’re young, but as we get older it we stop. I wonder if subconsciously we think memorization like that is childish.

If I remember getting prizes for knowing my memory verse along with stars for attendance, and then have few instances where I memorize later in life, it’d be easy to think it is something for children. But that would be a failure on our part. We are to store up God’s Word in us. We should meditate on the Bible. It’s as though we should marinate our minds with it, taking on its flavor. (How’s that for a fun mental image?)

When we do so, and the words dig their roots deep into us, God will use it to continue to shape us after the likeness of Jesus Christ. When such life-giving words saturate our minds our entire personalities will come under their influence.

So in light of this, and in light of the conversation I had this morning in which I said I wanted to do something about it, I’m going to put up some verses on the right hand side of the site as memory verses. Every week we read many chapters, then we focus in on one passage during our focus passage, and now (if you’re so inclined) we can try to commit one even smaller selection to memory.

This is new, ie. easy for me to forget, so if it doesn’t get updated regularly–OR if you have suggestions for the verses for the week, let me know. For this week I thought we’d use:

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

2 Corinthians 5:20-21