2 Corinthians 2 chapter 5, you see it printed on the sheet there. Not a particularly long passage this evening, but a very helpful and there's so much condensed into this and unpacking it. It's just great. If anyone has caused grief, he has not so much grieved me as he has grieved all of you to some extent, not to put it too severely. The punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient. Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. I urge you, therefore, to reaffirm your love for him. Another reason I wrote you was to see if you would stand the test and be obedient in everything. Anyone you forgive, I also forgive. And what I have forgiven, if there was anything to forgive, I have forgiven in the sight of Christ for your sake, in order that Satan might not outwit us, for we are not unaware of his schemes. Well, remember the situation in Corinth. Paul writing back to them, writing this second letter that we have in the New Testament, third letter probably that he wrote to them. Some commentators would go as far as to say it was the fourth letter that he wrote to them, or it's because it's made up of fragments of two others. What we've got here is Paul's response to the criticisms of him personally, and by implication therefore, and this is the real target of those who are doing the criticism, of his gospel. So there are those who want the Corinthian Christians to start living their lives based on some foundation other than the gospel that Paul and the apostles preached. And so Paul is defending himself because he wants to defend true Christianity and the gospel by which you live a true Christianity. He wants to defend himself, not simply so that people will think he's nice and therefore the gospel is true, but he wants to defend all his actions and his attitude because they actually flow from, they are demonstrations of the gospel that he has been preaching. They're demonstrations of life in Christ. So when Paul's defending himself so that they'll believe the gospel, don't think that it's, if people think Paul is nice, they will therefore think the gospel is true. You know, nice Christian equals true message. Because we all know that doesn't work. And people don't think like that. People just think you're nice. And they may find that attractive, or they might find that quite repulsive. Or somewhere in between. So it's not, I'm nice, therefore believe what I say on the basis of my niceness. It's what I have been to you is the very demonstration of the gospel that I have been preaching. It's a demonstration of its truth, but it's how to live the Christian life. So what these people are wanting you to live by is not only a wrong message, it will produce the wrong life. So these people who come in full of spiritual bling, with their gold teeth and highfalutin hair and their big cars and chariots and all the rest of it, with their fantastic rhetoric. These people who command high prices for their oratory. These people who have hoodwinked you into a sort of Judaizing thing because some of it's come from Jerusalem. These people are not going to get you walking a true Christian life. They're not going to get you walking with Jesus. They'll get you following their stuff and they'll want you to become like them. You'll want to become like them. That'll be part of the package. So you'll become like the wrong people. You won't become like Jesus. Paul is saying that the way we were amongst you, that's coming out of the gospel. That's how to live the Christ-like life. That's how to be a disciple of Jesus. So as he's writing this, against this background of those who are being critical, those who are, for instance, as we were looking at last week and on Sunday evening, those who are making capital out of the fact that he changed his plans and didn't visit them twice, on his way to Macedonia and then on his way back from Macedonia. As he's replying to all these, it would appear that there is one person in particular who has been at the core of this, who has latched on to this notion of discrediting Paul and his gospel, who has been swayed by those who have come into the church. who probably, going back to 1 Corinthians chapter 1, wouldn't have been of the Paul party, but might have been of the Apollos or the Cephas party, or might have pulled the spiritual wool over people's eyes and said, oh, I'm of Jesus. So it would appear from what Paul writes in what I've just read, if anyone has caused grief, he is not so much da-da-da-da-da, and verse seven, now he said you ought to forgive and comfort him so that he will not be overwhelmed. Eight, reassure your love for him. There's a person in there, in that fellowship in Corinth, who has been at the heart of the malice against Paul and the sort of the spiritual deceit, if you like, that's been going on. And so here, Paul writes about what to do with that person because it would appear that at least that person has seen the error of what they've been doing. So what Paul is writing about is not somebody who is proudly refusing to accept that they've done anything wrong. He's not writing about a person who is still, you know, sort of messing things up. He's not writing about somebody who is still active in their opposition against Paul and Paul's gospel and for the deceivers, so to speak. He's writing about somebody who has seen it and somebody who has experienced, the word punishment in verse six is rather a strong translation, has received the admonition, has received the sort of the godly discipline from people, has seen what it's like and they felt it. And they have felt it with great sorrow. So that's the situation that Paul's writing into. It's almost certainly the person who's mentioned here is almost definitely not the person who's mentioned in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, who has been engaged in sexual immorality and everybody's been approving of it. Because this person is somebody who Paul identifies as, if anyone has caused grief, he has not so much grieved me. This has been something which has been directed against Paul and has grieved Paul and has been done to wound Paul. This is somebody who, you know, this isn't the sexual immorality thing of 1 Corinthians 5, this is part of the opposition to Paul, which is why he's writing about it again and which is why he identifies this person in the way that he does in verse five as somebody who has not so much grieved me as actually grieved all of you to some extent. So, that's the situation. We'll talk about it in a little more detail now. 360 degree grace is just a phrase to describe the fact that The grace that affects the fellowship here, the grace that Paul wants there to be in the fellowship, really is grace. That is, it's love for somebody who has been doing damage. It's love for somebody who has been willfully inflicting damage on people. So it really is grace. But it's just grace that has to be shown by everybody and covering everybody. So it's not, you know, a line between Offender and Paul. It's got to sweep right around. Everybody's got to show this. It's all-encompassing. So that's why I call it 360-degree grace. Some of you have perhaps had a 360-degree review at work. Anybody seen a 360-degree review? Yeah? Very well done, Mark. Did you survive? All right, okay. Did that get peer-reviewed? So what you do then get co-reviewed by other people to see if your review of yourself is okay? I've just undergone a 360 degree review, or I think I'm actually in the process of going through it. I'm going on a leadership program later on this month for a week. down in Henley on Thames. Someone has to go and slum it there. And it's part of the preparation so that when you get there they can make the most of it all and maximum benefit for each person who's going on it and interacting together. you have to have a 360 degree review, which means you fill in, I had to fill in 29 questions about myself and then some boxes for comments and that kind of thing. And I send that back and nominate then a whole lot of other people to co-review. So they get a review of my reviews. So what you do is then you look at the gap between what you think about yourself and what everybody else thinks about you. or the gaps, plural, probably 28 out of 29. And one of the things it reveals is whether or not what you think about yourself is remotely anything like what anybody else thinks of you, which is one of the key things that comes out of it. And it just, it's a very interesting process. I think I will get the results of it, although they're anonymised for obvious reasons. And it'll be fascinating to see what that's like. It sounds a bit like psychoanalysis. No, there's no psychoanalysis involved, thankfully. No, it's just a straight sort of, you know, in this circumstance, would you do this or that? There's no... No, I don't think any psychologists are involved. But... Well, it's the same sort of thing. You see, it isn't just one person who's doing the offence, or Paul. Everybody's involved. And for the thing to work, for the forgiveness, the restoration, for the thing to be made right again, lots of people have got to get involved. And so, 360 degree grace, nobody can afford to be judgmental in this situation. Nobody can afford to win because it's grace. So the situation is that the person who's caused grief for Paul, and certainly when Paul uses this language of grieving, then it is not simply said something bad, but has said something bad and it has really hurt. And it's a grief, it's not just an untruth. It's real grief that it's caused. If anyone has caused grief, he has not so much grieved me as he has grieved all of you, to some extent, not to put it too severely. So, because it's aimed at Paul, and because Paul has preached and practically modeled gospel living to them all, then the attack on Paul has had an influence on all the rest of them. And so they have all felt both sort of a distance from Paul, they felt the awkwardness and the tension of the factions that have been stirred up, They've been thrown a real wobbly as far as following Christ is concerned. So this thing against Paul has just sent its shockwaves throughout the whole fellowship. So you've all been grieved. And of course as he transfers language from himself to the others, the grief language, then he's not simply saying you've all been sold something that isn't true. which has discredited me and the gospel and all that kind of thing. It has done you damage. You felt it. You felt the knocks. You felt the hurt. You felt the disturbance of it all. You felt the sense of loss. So there is collateral damage that has been done. And the consequence is that Paul is not sort of presenting them with something they don't already know. He's just raising it because of what he's going to write next about the restoration. The punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient. Now that, verse six is, you know, the translation is okay in the NIV, but punishment is too strong a word and the majority is too weak a word. Punishment inflicted on him is really the admonition, the sense of rebuke and correction that he's had. He hasn't been thrashed or something like that. He's been spiritually disciplined by the majority. really means everyone. It's just a little phrase which normally gets translated as basically all of you. So when we read that, we read that inflicted on him by the majority, you immediately think, oh, there must be a minority that hasn't been doing, you know, because that's the way we think. You know, you've got 98%, what happened to the 2%? You focus on what's missing. So when you say the majority, what about the rest? Are they anti-Paul as well? But the phrase really means basically everybody. Basically everybody, even those who have been drawn into this thing, basically everybody turned on this person. And that has been enough, Paul is saying. Enough already. So the problem is that the collateral damage has created something like a tsunami of disapproval, ostracizing, blame, shame, that kind of thing, heaped on this person. And that is the problem that Paul is addressing. Paul isn't addressing what the person and those who were with him and all that kind of thing have been saying about him. He isn't addressing the sort of the trashing of his reputation done spiritually and subtly and all the rest of it. He's not addressing that at all. That's not on the radar screen. It's loving the person who has done this. That's what's coming out of Paul's heart. The problem is that the guy who's done this has just experienced this like everybody turning on him thing. The punishment inflicted on him by pretty much everybody is sufficient, enough already. So the consequence of the collateral damage, and this is typically Corinthian, is just immature in terms of grace. Collateral damage. It's a phrase that gets used for, thank you for asking Mitch, it's a phrase that gets used in battle zones for instance, so you send a missile in for an enemy target and it takes out loads of civilians around it as well. So collateral means to the side, lateral. People who are standing on the side get injured as well. That's collateral damage. And it sometimes gets used for friendly fire on your own side, but more often than not, it refers to civilians getting caught up in a military operation. So it's people standing in the wings and spectators get injured too, kind of thing. Innocent parties. So that damage that's being inflicted on everybody else, when Paul was the target, has reaped for the person involved this sort of judgment by everybody. And that's what Paul wants to deal with. So he deals with it in seven through nine in the first instance. And that is how they should deal with it in Corinth. And the way they've got to do it is simply to reaffirm their love for him. This is somebody who's been in the fellowship. It's somebody who they have known and loved like anybody else in the fellowship. When we read in verse 8, reaffirm your love fame, it doesn't mean that previously he was somebody extra special, like they would love him but not everybody else, it's just a way of saying he was part of the fellowship. So what you have to do is reaffirm the love fame. Here, let's come first of all from verse seven. Now instead, that is instead of inflicting any more on him, of course, you know, enough already. Instead of reacting to the way that he's grieved you all by turning against him and cold shouldering and all that kind of stuff, you've got to show grace. Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him. so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. Now let's take the three parts of that. You ought to forgive. Forgiveness is a more complicated process than we usually talk about. Usually we talk about something and call it forgiveness, which is not necessarily forgiveness. And sometimes it's too quick to be real forgiveness. Sometimes it never really acknowledges the hurt and the offense in order to be really forgiveness. And there are many people, some of them, we've seen them on TV, who very quickly forgive somebody who's done something to a member of their family or whatever. And then sometimes you hear about later on, a year or two later, and they've just fallen apart. And at the time, everybody said, oh, great, wonderful, that was a really Christian thing, you know, there on TV, being interviewed, and you know, dying daughter in his arms, and he said he forgave the bombers. And then later, you see that actually, he's a complete mess. And he wasn't strong with grace straight away. It was too fast, it wasn't real. There was no time for it to go in, get processed, work through, and come out as forgiveness. The thing we often call forgiveness is too quick, it's too easy, and the reason why it's too quick and too easy is that it doesn't acknowledge the offense. And if you don't acknowledge the offence, you can't forgive. You're not forgiving. Because forgiveness is what you do in the light of grievous offence. If you don't feel the grievous offence, or if there's no acknowledgement of the grievous offence, then what's going on isn't forgiveness. That is to say, forgiveness has to have within it an element of what, in some circles, gets called truth and justice. So the process of reconciliation, and this is how it's panned out in many countries, Rwanda is one of them, and has been a model for how this thing can happen in communities. The process of reconciliation is a process of truth, justice, and reconciliation. And if you don't get the first two in there, you'll never actually get the third, because something will always be held against. something will always be not let go of, something will always be resented. So if you don't do the truth and justice thoroughly and painfully, you never get to the reconciliation. And you can call it forgiveness and sound spiritual, but actually you're just being shallow. And it'll bite you later, it'll jump up and bite you later, it'll jump up and bite other people as well. because everyone else has moved on, it will become apparent that you haven't. So when Paul says forgive, he's not saying just say I forgive you and get on with life. Not at all. There has to be the acknowledgement of the woundedness. And that has to be owned by the person who has been wounded. And that has to be owned by the person who's done the wounding. So there's got to be the truth about that. So in order for the Corinthian Christians to forgive this person, then both the Corinthian Christians and this person within the fellowship have to acknowledge openly, we did the wrong thing. The person has to say, I did the wrong thing and I've hurt you. And they have to say, yes, you did hurt us. It has to be the truth. And there has to be the justice, that forgiveness is not just sweeping under the carpet. That's not forgiveness. Forgiveness is not just turning a blind eye. Now, why am I saying all this? Because I've been doing some degree on counseling or something? Not at all, I haven't done a degree in counseling. I'm saying all this because that's how the cross works. God forgives. He does not turn a blind eye to sin. He does not sweep sin under the carpet. He does not feel no offense at sin. It is grievous to him. And we are not forgiven unless we repent. So you see, the forgiveness with which we have been forgiven which is the forgiveness we must show, forgive as the Lord forgave you. That is in the same way, not simply because. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. As you have received, so give. So that grace that has come into you must flow through you to others. what has come to us, the forgiveness that you have, if you're a Christian, and you can go to bed tonight and praise God that you are forgiven, after having looked at the two things from Palliative Vision on the back, of course, that forgiveness involved truth, no saccharine version of history, no candy floss CV, truth. that we are worse sinners than we could possibly imagine. All the ways we can describe that. And justice, someone had to pay a price. A death had to be died. And the acknowledgement of all this as we repent and as we trust Christ and not our repentance. then there's forgiveness. And anything short of that is just, you're just kind of hoodwinking yourself. So when Paul says forgive, it is because he has already said someone has caused grief, and they have grieved you. And the person knows it, and they are feeling it. There has been the truth, which has given some justice in the situation. Now, he says, to the forgiveness. And forgiving means that you no longer hold it against somebody. Now, here's the thing. There is something which you can do Even if there is no open acknowledgement of the truth and no justice done, there is something you can do. And what you can do as the grieved party is let go. You let go. What you do is you let go of the sense of offense. If you don't, it will eat you up and kill you. But here's the thing. If you don't, your sense of offense will become an idol to you. It will become an idol. How? Well, in the Bible, an idol is anything you love or anything you fear. That is, anything you adore or anything you fret over. Either way, what's calling the shots in you isn't God. It isn't God. So it has begun to function in what the Bible would readily identify as an idol, because it's governing you. So if you don't let go of it, you'll be the one who suffers. If you don't let go of it, you'll be the one who goes further and further and further away from God, because this thing will get bigger and bigger and bigger. it will be an idol. So you have to let go of it. Even if you don't get the truth out, and even if you don't think justice is done, even if forgiveness seems like a long way off and may never come to heaven, you can let go. In fact, you must let go. You must let go of the sense of offense. of the sense of having to win. You must let go of the sense of injustice. You must let go of it as something which is beginning to control you. So, the Corinthians, the truth is out. Justice is in the air. Now Paul says, press on with the forgiveness. That's the first thing. Second thing, comfort him. What does comfort mean? Well, comfort is not sympathy. quite distinctly different words in the Greek and even though in our English culture nowadays we tend to confuse the two, if you're comforting someone you're basically saying they're there and I feel your pain and all those things and that's very nice but that's really sympathy and the Greek word feeling with somebody is exactly that, sun, which is in English sim, S-Y-M, and the pathos in English is Greek for feeling. So our English word sympathy means simply that you feel with somebody. We might often say empathy now for the same thing, although strictly speaking empathy would involve a group, and you would enter into what the group is feeling, but sympathy is feeling with somebody, feeling the same thing with somebody. Comfort is quite different. And in fact, comfort will sometimes look very, very different. In fact, sometimes you can comfort somebody and be accused of not being very sympathetic, they are so different. The Greek word is parakletos, the comforter. What's a paracletos? Para means alongside. It can sometimes mean above, but it means alongside, so parachute is the thing that's above you, but usually para means alongside. So a paramedic works alongside the medics, okay? Para means alongside. A cletos is somebody who sort of fortifies you. So comfort means that the word paracletus is somebody who draws alongside you on the way and you are weak and you are failing and your legs are going and all the rest of you are exhausted and they put their arm around you and you get their strength. So their strength becomes your strength because they are with you and right with you and shoulder to shoulder with you. And you haven't got any strength, but they have. So just by virtue of them being with you and right alongside, physically up close and personal, they are strengthening you. Not with your strength, but with theirs. So in the Old Testament, Jonathan sought out David to strengthen him in the Lord, in battle. The Holy Spirit as the comforter is the one who draws alongside and strengthens us in our walk so that we don't fall over in the Christian walk. Matthew was doing his Duke of Edinburgh Monday, Tuesday, and if you remember Monday nights weather, you'll remember that it was pretty atrocious. And on Monday night, Monday sort of afternoon, late morning, afternoon, he and four others in his little group on his DAV bronze expedition were walking up Morven. You know, lashing rain, strong wind, all the rest of it, and one of the group was struggling. And so Matthew and Magnus were both in the same group. So they took it in turns to walk behind this person going up the hill, just pushing him. Right? Up the hill, walking, did it like that. Which was great, because he got him to the top. Now, Matthew needed to do that, because he's seen me doing that with an unnamed member of our family in the Lake District, and it would be unfair, because Vi's not here for me to identify her. So, the strength that Matthew had, which is not enormous, but it was more than Lloyd, got Lloyd up the hill. And then Matthew and Magnus sort of took it in turns. They were just pushing. It's a dodgy thing, because you're going up a hill, and you're doing like that. So, you know, eye level, hmm, that could go horribly wrong. But you're shoving up the hill, and they got to the top of Mawden, where they all got blown over in the wind, or just about blown over. Now that is comfort. Was it comfortable for Lloyd? No. Not at all. Did it comfort him? Yes. And he got to the top of the hill. Comfort means putting strength in someone. So comfort can be quite robust. Comforting somebody can be, you know, not a soft voice, not a there there, not a feeling with them. In fact, comfort requires that you feel for them, but not with them. Comfort requires that you are strong with them and for them when they are weak. Comfort is not getting down into the hole with them. Comfort is being strong enough and stable enough to stand on solid ground and reach down and pull them up. So you get what comfort is about. Comfort is quite, it's a strengthening, robust thing. So you can comfort somebody by spurring them on. You comfort somebody by yelling at them, you know, on a racetrack or something. as they're going around, the sergeant major is in one sense, with the Greek word, comforting the poor squaddies on their boot camp by running alongside them on the assault course, yelling at them, because it will actually get them over the wall. So forgive them and put strength back into them. They're weak and they're broken and they need help. So you help them. Forgive and comfort him. And here's the third thing in this verse seven there, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow, so that he will not realize or feel or be crushed by, that's the best way of putting it, he will not be crushed by, so weakened that he is crushed by an excessive sorrow. Sorrow is excessive, not when there's a lot of it. Sorrow is excessive when it just completely crushes you and breaks you and you're never going to get up again. So excessive sorrow will make you do that with a steering wheel in front of an oncoming lorry. Excessive sorrow will make you loathe yourself and you'll never get over it. It will overwhelm you. Paul is urging these Corinthian Christians who have been forgiven and comforted by God to do the same. Which means that their love, I urge you therefore to reaffirm your love for him, is going to cover a multitude of sins. Which is exactly what God's love for us has done. Covered a multitude of sins. You put the lid on them. You're not going to look at them anymore. This is not sweeping under the carpet thing. We've seen it. We've talked about it. We've dealt with it. That's it. Draw a line under it. It's gone. It's no longer in sight. We're not looking at it and examining it anymore. We're not going to go into all that. We're not going to go back over the old ground again. We're not going to feast our eyes and feed on the thing. We're going to cover it. Gone. You know, we sometimes say that God forgets our sins. God has a short memory with our sins and everything. That's not actually what the Bible says. The Bible says what, if you can remember the particular verse that usually is in people's minds when they say this, he will what your sins no more. Thank you, Mitch, thank you. He will remember your sins no more. Now that is not a biblical way of saying God's got a short memory. Like he'd forget, he'd say, I forgot what happened then. You're like, we forget, it's because we can't remember. That's not true of God. Remembering sins is a description of calling them up again, recalling sins. And you do that in order to judge them again. You recall in order to remember them against somebody. What that verse describes is the kind of remembering that is done that is calling something up against somebody again. dredging up old things, dredging up old offenses, bringing up the grudges, and holding them against somebody again. And when the Bible says he remembers our sins no more, it's saying God will never bring them up. He's forgotten, he's sort of gone absent-minded a bit, a bit doddled. or he's sort of playing psychological tricks on himself. Because there would then be no eternal glory to grace, would there? There would be no eternal glory to the lamb who is slain. It is precisely because we will always know how bad we were that we will always glorify Christ for how glorious we've become in him. So God hasn't gone forgetful. It's saying God will no longer dredge that up. The offenses are covered. They've gone. The file is closed. And nobody's gonna go and get it out of the filing cabinet anymore and open it again. The file is closed. The sins are covered. It's gone. Love has closed the file. and they'll be remembered no more against you. That's what love does. Love covers a multitude. It's not blind, it's not doddled, it's not pretending. Precisely because the offense has been recognized, felt, acknowledged, justice has been done, grace has been shown, and love closes the file, dealt with. And if God remembers your sins no more, we won't remember your sins either. Remember in 1 Corinthians 13, in the middle bit about what love is, love is patient, love is kind. Remember that little bit? Love keeps no record of wrongs. Amazing, isn't it? Reaffirm your love for him. love will cover it, and you will strengthen him, and you will restore him, and that whole thing brings him back up out of the pit. And Paul has been waiting for them to do that. Verse nine, another reason I wrote was to see if you would stand the test and be obedient in everything, i.e., in all that I wrote to you. And I wrote to you, I've written to you about this. I've written to you about this. I've been waiting to see if you would pass the test and do this. So I'm writing to you about it again, because he didn't. Now, here's an interesting thing. What Paul is writing about here is grace. And the thing about grace is that showing grace doesn't put you in any position of superiority to the person that you're showing grace to. What do I mean by that? That what Paul is describing here is not a matter of the Corinthians with Paul winning. It's not a matter of winning. So if you forgive somebody, that doesn't make you superior to them. It's not a way of scoring spiritual points over somebody. Now that happens in situations, it happens in families, it can happen in churches. Somebody who has been forgiven something will actually always have it remembered. They did the bad thing. There'll always be a question mark over them. Their name will always be mentioned in a slightly different tone of voice. They'll never make it up to the front to read or they'll never make it onto a committee. What's happening there? What's happening is the people who did the forgiving and the restoring were never showing grace. They were exercising power. And forgiveness has become a power tool in the family or in the fellowship. Garrison Keeler, who used to do the Prairie Home Companion radio shows and each week gave the news from Lake Wobegon, a fictitious town in Minnesota. And it was just this most hilarious and gorgeous description of small town, middle America thing. And he makes a point in Lake Woebegone, you were always remembered for something stupid that you did when you were younger. It doesn't matter how old you did, how much you accomplished, whether you went to Chicago or somebody and made millions and came back and all the rest of it. you would always be known as the person who did something stupid. And as he's doing this and talking, he's always known as the person who drove his car in a clear day into a ditch on a straight road. And because he was driving along at 17 years old, driving along in a car, and three birds came down and swooped down and over and they just flew in front of him. And he says, it's a fascinating thing, who would not be fascinated by this? And so he was doing this and the birds went this with their own and that with their own. And then the long, long straight and a beautiful clear day and he's watching the birds and the birds just slowly veered off and he followed them into the ditch. And everybody said, how could you drive a car into a ditch on a straight road on a clear day? And he could never tell them. Nobody would ever believe him. I was following three birds that were flying in front of me. And so he lived with that forevermore. He was remembered as the kid who drove a car into the ditch. If you've shown true grace to the extent of protecting the very one who has grieved you from excessive sorrow, If you've done forgiveness and comforting, if love has covered a multitude of sins, so they're no longer remembered, then what forgiveness can never ever be is a power thing. You can never come out top and be remembered as the person who was wronged forevermore, so you're on a higher moral ground. If in a family or in a fellowship, somebody's always, you know, then that's not grace. That's power, and it's hideous, absolutely hideous in the sight of God, who does not make his sworn enemies constantly squirm so that those who were his sworn enemies learn to run to him and are dignified by him and are raised up by him and one day will shine with all the glory of Jesus. Romans 8, we're just waiting for the glory that is going to be revealed in us as the sons of God and daughters of God. We know that when we see him, we'll be made like him. for we will see him as he is. That's God's forgiveness. He who truly could play it for power, plays it for our good, for our benefit. And then you turn that the other way around for this guy who is close to being overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. Being forgiven never, ever, amongst Christians, should put you in the position of being weakened and forever downgraded, as if you've lost. Being forgiven should never humiliate you. Now, why? Well, this is why I've put a thing on the back about the grace of the cross and about backsliding, but particularly the grace of the cross from Valley of Vision. It's because every single one of us, every single one of us is only what we are by the grace of the cross. None of us can ever stand on any higher ground for any reason than anybody else. And we could forgive our brother 70 times 70 and we would still not be on any higher ground before God than the brother we were forgiving 70 times 70 times. Why? Because we only ever stand before God in Christ. We only ever stand before God because of his mercy by which we are not consumed. The only way into the most holy place is the new and living way, that is his body, the curtain that was torn. So if you've got grace and you're standing on grace ground, you can show grace. If you haven't got grace, you'll do forgiveness. And you might extend some comfort. And you might cover the sins. But you'll be doing it all to score some points. And the whole point about being a Christian is that none of us have got any points. The only points we've got are the ones Christ has given us. Without Christ, we are hell-bound sinners, and rightly so. Not just with nil point, but with an unbearable overdraft. So then it's gonna be grace all around, you see, because Paul's gonna join in. 10 and 11, anyone you forgive, I also forgive. And what I have forgiven, if there was anything to give, I have forgiven in the sight of Christ for your sake. So what he's saying, you've got to forgive this person. This has really messed up your fellowship and all that kind of stuff. And it's done the disturbances and all that. It's caused you grief. You've got to properly forgive this person. The truth is out. The justice is there. Forgive and comfort and restore this person. Reaffirm your love for them. Pull them back up out of the pit for any sake. love them to bits. But Paul knows that if they do that and he doesn't, he who has been the object of the original criticisms, then what? Then Paul's own lack of forgiveness, Paul's own resentment or whatever it happens to be, it will sow little seeds again back in Corinth. You can picture it, can't you? Someone six months later will say, Paul's still wounded. Paul's still crushed by this. And that will just stir the whole thing up again. So that the love that covered the sins won't be enough. The parties will realign. the I am of Paul crowd will rise again and the divisions will open up. It won't have been dealt with. So Paul, as the originally offended party, has to forgive as well. If he doesn't, what will happen? Satan will use it. You can guarantee if you hand Satan ammunition sooner or later at the time which is to suit him best, he will use it. He will use it. So I've forgiven him in the sight of Christ for your sake. Jesus knows this. It's gone. It's done. I've dealt with it. He knows he's hurt me. I've written to you about this all. The truth is out with me as well. The justice has happened. The justice is there. So I'm forgiving him too, in the sight of Christ, for your sake, in order that Satan might not outwit us. So we think we've dealt with it. Actually, one of us hasn't. In he comes again. Bang, there's a grenade. in order that Satan might not outwit us, took us on the blind side. For we are not unaware of his schemes. So Paul participates in the grace, and grace becomes, I'm calling it there, a weapon of war. It should be the word of, between weapon and war. Grace is a weapon of war. Warfare against Satan, that is, not against anybody else. Grace is a weapon of war. Grace not to score points over somebody else and win. Grace not to make you look good and somebody else look bad. Grace is a weapon of war against Satan. Where does the Bible tell us that Satan was disarmed? We're in Colossians here. Yeah, Colossians 1. It was on the cross. And you would think to yourself, if ever there was a place where Satan looked like he was winning, it was the cross. No, no. The cross disarmed him. Having disarmed him through the cross. Because that's where the grace hit ground zero. Grace as a weapon of war was detonated on the cross. Grace as the ultimate destructive force exploded at Calvary and disarmed Satan there. As he who knew no sin was made sin, for you and me, as he bore in his body on the cross our sin, we who were his enemy. So grace is the ultimate weapon of war against Satan in the church and in the world. So there we are. There's the two snippets from The Grace of the Cross and Backsliding, and you might want to have a look at those lasting at night, as it says on the front there, before you fall asleep tonight, to fill your mind with the grace of God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we ask that you will Press your word, by your spirit, press your word into our minds, lest we forget. We ask you, press your word into our hearts, lest we disobey. We pray, Lord, that you would press this word tonight into our prayers, as we try and obey in our own strength. And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.