2 Corinthians, chapter 4, verse 16. So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen, but at what cannot be seen. For what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God. a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to be closed with our heavenly dwelling, if indeed, when we have taken it off, we will not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden, because we wish not to be enclosed. but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared for us this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always confident, even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith. not by sight. Yes, we do have confidence and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So, whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please Him. Our text is, we walk by faith, and not by sight. There are basically two ways to walk, either by faith or by sight. We've had some wonderful studies on people like Abraham and Moses, of course Jesus himself who knew about walking by faith. And in the context, as you have heard this morning, Paul can say we're afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed. And as he goes on to talk about death and resurrection, it's in this context that we find our text, for we walk by faith and not by sight. I'll just read a couple of those verses again. So, we're always confident even though we know that while we're at home in the body, we're away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we do have confidence and would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So, whether we're at home or away, it's our aim to please Him. Now, while Paul is speaking about living and dying and the life hereafter, his main emphasis really is that we're to live in this life now by faith. And in the context, he's actually talking a lot about ministry and his ministry as he's confronting those who are false teachers, he says our aim is to please him. So, that's the setting for it. Now, in a very simple way, we can understand the text by saying that Paul and his companions, just like Abraham, they've heard God speak, they've believed the promises of God and in the face of opposition and trouble, they look beyond the affairs of this life to a city whose maker and founder are God. And so they've set their heart to walk by faith and not by sight. Now, I want to start off by talking about what it means to walk by sight and not by faith. Get that the right way round. To walk by sight, and not by faith. And to do this it will be helpful for us to understand a little more of these false teachers who were there lurking in the background troubling the church at Corinth. I think that this is actually a very important issue. The same kind of teachers are troubling the Christian community and churches today. In 2 Corinthians particularly, Paul is speaking about his ministry in contrast to the ministry of others who have come to the Corinthian church with a different gospel. And a bit further down the track in 2 Corinthians, Paul calls them super apostles, false apostles, He speaks of them as deceitful workers disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. Now, to understand what it means to walk by sight rather than faith, I want to further open up the background a little of these opponents of Paul and we'll start by using the text itself. If you go to a Bible concordance that relates to your English Bible, you'll see that the word sight occurs many times, about 40 times depending on the translation. But in this place, Paul has actually used a word that's not commonly used in the New Testament when speaking about sight. In fact, the word only occurs five times. The word here translated sight is the Greek word eidos, eidos. Now, it can mean sight or it can mean form, something that would be, would seem to be quite different. And the word here translated as sight is not the usual way that the New Testament writers talk about sight. Now it would be, it would sound silly of course to say we walk by faith and not by form. And yet the word carries this meaning which goes beyond our English word sight. Paul uses the word just once more. and that's in 1 Thessalonians 5.22. He says, abstain from every ados or form of evil. Luke uses the word twice at the baptism of Jesus. We read, the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily ados, in bodily form, like a dove. and Luke uses it a second time. While he was praying, this is on the Mount of Transfiguration, the ados here translated generally as appearance, but of course form sounds okay as well. His face was changed. The other reference is in John's Gospel where Jesus, confronted by the unbelieving Jews, said to them, ''The Father who sent me has himself testified on my behalf. You've never heard his voice or seen his form.'' Now, this word ados that Paul uses when he says, we walk by faith and not by sight, is actually part of the lingo of the Greek philosophers and wisdom teachers who are there in the background of all this. Now, I want to open this up just a little more. Plato and Socrates both used the term ados to speak about the true reality or the very heart and essence of something and someone. So, they were ever in search of this absolute truth or absolute knowledge. And the big question is, well, how do you get to the absolute truth and the absolute knowledge? Well, if I can quote Plato, philosophy has the potential to give us the truth directly in all its fullness. So there you have it. What are you doing at summer school? Get off to the uni and study philosophy. Now, what's the point of all this from the perspective of the philosophers? Why would we want to know, all there is to know about all things. Well, Plato and Socrates thought that if you could know the eidos, the essence and the form of a thing, you would have control over it. Now, they may have been fools in a biblical sense, but they weren't silly. They were great men, certainly of worldly wisdom, and they understood the power of knowledge. Now, you might be sitting there thinking, well, this is some sort of silly ancient nonsense, it's nothing to do with today, but in fact you're very wrong because this is the quest of mankind today. I don't know whether any of you saw it, but recently there was a series on Albert Einstein on the TV and I watched that, fascinated by it all. But Einstein died a disappointed man without having finished his, what they termed, or without having finalised his theory of everything. and they stated that Einstein thought that he could know the mind of God and that's what he'd worked on for the last years in his life. Now, Monday night I looked at the SBS News before coming down to the meeting and one of the media articles was Prayer Heals. And I pricked up my ears and thought, oh, I'll have a listen to this. This will be good. And it turned out to be an article about the Gnostic society. Now, gnosis is the Greek word knowledge. So, it's about the knowledge people. How wonderful if prayer heals by knowledge somehow. If prayer heals, then we have no need of God. And the spokesman said, the mind is more powerful than we think. And Geoffrey's spoken about something of the dynamic of the human being. And scientists today are presently working to make it possible to operate our computers and other electronic devices with the power of our minds. And that will happen before too long. we ought to know that many so-called occult practices actually arise from the human psyche. Now, often I've heard Christians say that prayer changes things. Well, that sounds like a pretty good pagan statement. As Christians, we know that God changes things in answer to prayer But to simply say that prayer changes things, then you see things, whatever they are, can be changed by our word of prayer and God doesn't in fact come into the equation. Speaking about prayer, I don't know if you heard a little media article just prior to Christmas about the mail system in Israel. they were having trouble coping with all the letters that people were writing to God. They didn't know what to do with them and some of them decided to open up a couple of these to see what they were about and they found this desperate fellow had written to God and he was in some plight and he'd asked God for 5,000 shekels to help him through this great dilemma. So, touched by his letter, the posties whipped around and they took up a collection and collected, I think it was 4,300 shekels and they popped it in an envelope and sent to him. A couple of weeks later, there was another letter addressed to God in this same handwriting. So, they opened it up and it said, oh, thank you very much God for sending me this money. but next time you send me anything, please, whatever you do, don't send it through the postal service. They're a bunch of crooks and I only got half part of it. Now, you've only got to go into a bookshop and you'll find the shelves stacked with esoteric literature, Gnostic stuff, a promising enlightenment, but you're lucky today if you can find anything Christian in a bookshop that isn't particularly a Christian one. Noel mentioned spirituality. Spirituality is the big N word of the day and Noel said that we spend all our lives justifying ourself and this is evidenced by our spirituality. I was in a group of uni people not too long ago and one person gave this great dissertation about her spirituality which she discovered sitting under a mulberry tree in the bush becoming one with the land. So, just be careful of this spirituality thing. Paul says in Colossians, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy, empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe and not according to Christ. Now, Jesus said you've never heard his voice nor seen his eidos, his form, his essence. But you see, rebellious humanity says, oh yeah, who says so. We'll see about that. What a challenge. And so, the quest for the holy grail of truth and the knowledge of all things is on and we will know. We will have control. After all, we're the rulers of the earth and we'll work out our own destiny and control the universe. So, this is the way of those who walk by sight, ados, and not by faith. So, here we go round the mulberry bush or at least the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which seems to grow in every person's personal paradise. God planted the garden and he put the man into it. and God planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and God commanded them not to eat. They had a choice to obey, to disobey. And of course if you don't obey then you must know. You must know the Ados of all things so that you in fact can be in control. And we want to know all there is to know For when we know what God knows, we can do what God does and we will be like God. So, we who have eaten from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will apply all our wisdom and technology to understand the essence and the ados of all things. Today, we seek to know the essence of a man. And so, people are working on the map of the human genome and when that's all sorted out, then you see we can heal mankind. We're trying to clone not just animals, but human beings and then we'll be the creators and saviours of the future humanity. and so we'll search for wisdom and enlightenment from one corner of the world to another rather than be enlightened and enlivened by the Word of God. because you see it is God who knows our eidos. He knows our essence, he knows our form and that actually gives him some authority and control over us because he's the creator and we are only creatures. And this is our worst nightmare and so the quest for knowledge apart from God is on. Now, such knowledge is always in the face of God. We don't want to obey God and if we know the form and essence, the ados of all things, then we can actually determine what's right and wrong. And I'm sure like me you've heard people say, well, I'll decide what's right for me. To walk by sight and not by faith is actually to sin with a high hand. The great arrogance is that I think that I am my own God and I claim that there's no other God beside me. And that's what it means to walk by sight and not by faith. Now, just a quick word about knowledge. Paul and the scriptures are not anti-wisdom or anti-knowledge. Young people today know and are doing some extraordinary things. I was with a group of uni students not long ago. Some of them were working on their doctorates. I was talking to one young guy and he told me that he was working on a project to clone sheep's eyes with a view to being able to do the same kind of thing for human beings. Now, we can know, there are two ways to know really. We can know in submission to God. So as we walk by faith we receive knowledge as a gift from God and we use it to serve God and for his glory. Or we can walk by sight and in the flesh then we assert our own Godhead and in fact the absence of any other. And there's a very fine line here. If you're working on the genome project, well, where do you stop? Where do you cross the line and start to play God? And we ought to be praying for men, Christian men and women, to be involved in some of these things so that that wisdom and knowledge that's being discovered can be rightly directed under God. Now we come then to walking by faith. It's been made clear to us that Christian faith is not something that we do. It is a gift from God and our response to the faithfulness of God. So, faith is not some kind of desperate hope that if I really believe or visualise or stand on my head or do something else, then I'll get what I want. This is actually faith in myself. It is occult in origin rather than Christ related. The matter is very simple. To walk by faith is nothing more than accepting that we are creatures and that we're dependent on God, our Creator, and so we hear and obey His Word. Now, we've heard some wonderful examples in the school of those who walk by faith, Moses, Abraham, Sarah and so on. And what I want to do now is just explore a little of what Paul means when he says in his context, we walk by faith. How did that work out in his practical living and ministry? And that might be helpful for us. Now, it would be good if we had time to sit down together and read all of 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians and just sort all that out. but I want to take some passages from chapter 3 through to the beginning of chapter 6, and if you've got your Bibles that will be helpful if you follow because I'm needing to go fairly quickly. Chapter 3, 1. Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Surely we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you. So, here's Paul walking by faith and he's in the middle of a big problem. These wisdom teachers, these people were not technically Gnostics, the Gnostics came a bit later, but they were people with wisdom teaching and they had credentials. They came with their letters of recommendation and they were enticing Christians away from the church. The sad thing for us today is that many of these people are not outside the church but actually inside the church. Now, Paul doesn't try and compete with these teachers on their own terms. He doesn't race off to the rhetorical school or to the Bible school, whatever it may be. This is what he says. First of all, in verse 3, and you show that you are a letter of Christ prepared 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. Such is the confidence that we have through Christ towards God. So, here it is. We've got no letters from important people to prop up our ministry. But you are the letter of Christ prepared by us, written by the Spirit. Just take a look at your lives and see what's happened. Secondly, he says, verse 5, not that we're competent of ourselves to claim anything that's coming from us. Our competence is from God who made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant and not of the letter but of the spirit, for the letter kills but the spirit gives life. So did Paul get upset and rattled by these people who'd come along with all their credentials, the wallow in his inferiority? Well, he didn't. He actually accepted that he was not competent to do what he was there to do. And it was faith in the God who called him and equipped him for ministry and the working of the Holy Spirit through his proclamation that saw the work of God unfolding. Now, if we just quickly go to 2 Corinthians 3.17. He says, now the Lord is the spirit, where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. He's been talking about the glory of the old covenant and in contrast to the glory of the new where there's been a veil over the eyes that's now been lifted and in verse 18 he says, and all of us with unveiled faces seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another and this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. Well, so much for their lack of credentials. In the first session Martin said that the verse, we walk by faith and not by sight, is sometimes used to justify the notion that faith is a leap into the dark. and he commented that faith is not a leap into the dark, but a leap into the light. And if you walk by faith and not by sight, then you're actually in for a big surprise. And the surprise is that in knowing God, there comes a transformation of you within yourself as a person and a knowing from God by the Spirit. In John's Gospel you might recall Jesus says, if you're my friends, keep my commandments and I will reveal myself to you. And in 1 Corinthians, Paul actually says that because the Spirit is in us, we have the mind of Christ. If Einstein had read that, it would have saved him a lot of pain. We have the mind of Christ and as Geoffrey said in the earlier session, we know all we need to know in God. So, what about the continuing sin in our life that Randall spoke about in the session yesterday? I think he said something like, stop believing in your failures. Well, take a look at these verses that we've just read. Walk by faith and not by sight. Paul says, being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. And when we're attacked by other people, we get insecure, we wonder and doubt that we're about what we should be. And the problem is that very often we do not even see what God is doing in us. But we need to work by walk by faith and not by sight and understand that God by His power is actually at work in us, transforming us and we're knowing His revelation. Now, I think I'm going to run out of time. Let me just go down to 2 Corinthians 4.4 and Paul says there, in their case the God of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God. But we don't proclaim ourselves, we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake. For it is the God who said, let the light shine out of darkness, who shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay jars. That's better. so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. So you see, in contrast to the super apostles who think that they've got it all, Paul refuses to accept any of the glory because it's the work of God. He says, Jesus Christ is Lord and we are slaves for Jesus' sake. And the extraordinary power comes from God, not from us. So, you see, what he's saying as he walks by faith is basically, I am a creature. God is the creator and that's what walking by faith is about. I'll just pick up 2 Corinthians 4.8, we're afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying about in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. Note how he keeps on talking about this, the life of God becoming visible. in our bodies and that which is invisible by faith becomes visible and it becomes visible in us so that others can see that life of Christ. While we live we're always being given up to death for Jesus' sake so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So, as we carry about the body of the death of Jesus, his death is my death, his death is my life, but here is the matter of this thing of revelation again. The invisible becomes visible by the power of the Spirit. And so, I walk by faith in the affliction and the crushing events of life and instead of despair and depression and feeling abandoned, by faith I can actually look and see that revelation of the life of Jesus being made visible in the weak sinful flesh. Now, I'll just jump down to 2 Corinthians 5.6, sorry 5.16. Paul says, ''From now on therefore we regard no one from a human point of view, even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, for we know him no longer.'' So, if anyone is in Christ, there is new creation Old things have passed away. See, everything has become new. All of this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us a ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. Now, what an extraordinary thing that he's saying. I think it was John Dunkley this morning who gave that beautiful illustration from Narnia about the fallen Mr. Tumnus who came to Edmund, the wayward child who'd betrayed his brothers and addressed him as Your Majesty. Now, walking by faith, Paul actually says from now on we regard no one from a human point of view. We once knew Christ in that way, but now we know him differently and I will never again see anyone from a human point of view, but only through the eyes of God. Now, wouldn't it be wonderful to be in a congregation where we actually believed and walked by faith in that? would do away with the criticism, would do away with all the games and things that we play because we would know that God is dynamically at work in this brother and sister and we are justified by faith and all the garbage doesn't matter. But here we are together as the people of faith being transformed by God. And it's in this context then that Paul encourages us to ministry, to walk by faith is actually to centre our lives on the crucified and risen Lord and to share his vision for the salvation of those whom he has died. So, all this is from God who reconciled us to himself and given us a ministry of reconciliation. Witnessing is not a trauma or a hardship, but seeing what we see by faith, how can we do anything else but share this extraordinary knowledge and wisdom and insight that God has given us? Now, I want to finish with a song, 348, You Made Us To Reflect Your Glory.