As we prepare to turn in God's Word this morning, I would invite you to pray with me one more time. Father in heaven, we thank you for your Word. We thank you that you are the God who speaks and brings about the effect that you intend as you send forth your Word. So Father, we pray now that as You reveal Yourself to us and as You proclaim the Gospel of Your Son, that You would use it to produce every fruit inside everyone of our hearts and lives. If there be one here who is not yet born again, Father, we ask that by Your grace You would make today the day of salvation, Would you give faith? Would you cause them to be born again and to look to Christ and to rely upon Him for the righteousness that He brings and for everything that He supplies for life and for godliness? Father, for all of the rest of us, we pray that as we receive Your Word today that You would sanctify us, that You would build us up in our faith, and that You would mature us into the image and the stature and to mature manhood. in Christ Jesus our Lord. It's His name that we pray. Amen. I invite you to stand with me this morning for the hearing of God's Word from the second epistle of Paul to the church in Corinth. We begin in the 17th verse. Now the Lord is the Spirit And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's Word. But by the open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God who said, let light shine out of darkness, has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. So far the hearing of God's Word. You may be seated. Well for those of you who were with us two weeks ago, we began a three-part series which will last for the month of September. And two weeks ago we saw from God's Word who a faithful pastor ought to be. In and of himself, he is a man like the prophet Isaiah, who is conscious of his own sinfulness, his lips stained by guilt, unworthy to speak the name and the word of the holy, holy, holy God. in and of himself, he is insufficient to speak the word of God that will have this dual effect as it goes forth of bringing some to life and some to death. Who is sufficient for these things? And yet the Lord has called both Those who are called pastors and all who are called elders in the church to preach and teach Him, in Him and by Him. And that, of course, has everything to do with what we come to today in this text, and that is what a faithful pastor does. Not who he is, but what he does. And today, the Spirit by Paul, I think, has three things for us in this text. First, he tells us one thing that we do not do. then two things that we will not do and one thing that we shall do. So first, from the fourth chapter in verse one, Paul says, we do not lose heart. We do not lose heart. You all know this, but service in the church is terrific. And it is also tough. We are all sinners who are beset with our own sin. And we live in a very fallen world. And on account of these two things, every day and each week brings upon us trials and snares We engage the thorns of our own flesh and we feel the barbs that we rub against as we live life with each other in the life of the church and with the neighbors in the world in which God has called us to live. The question that I suppose you ask is the same that I ask myself from time to time, and it is, how can we keep on going? Why should I not give up? The Apostle Paul is so kind to us, again, by the work of the Spirit, because he shares with us some of his own heart. Why would Paul say, we do not lose heart, if in fact he had been tempted lots of times to do that, to lose heart? to give up, to shrink back from the task that the Lord had called him to do because it was just so painful and just so hard. And if we're going to tell the truth about the way that life in the church so often feels, it can seem sometimes as the very best of times, when our hearts are so cheered and warmed, not just by the gospel of God at work within us, but in the fellowship and the sweetness that we share with each other. And on some other days, it can seem as though the hardest of times in that same heart is so heavy and weighed down by the cares that we bear. The Lord Jesus Christ, of course, set his face like flint to go to his cross, but on the night that he was betrayed, he was in that Gethsemane, Mount of Olives, The place where there would have been presses to extract the oil from all of the olives that grew on those trees. And the Lord Jesus felt himself sore pressed. And he prayed out to the Lord, his Father, knowing what he was about to do as he went to the cross. And the Lord Jesus prayed and said, Father, let this cup pass from me. He prayed so intently that his sweat was as drops of blood. He begged the Father, do not make me go to my cross. Let there be some way to do what needs to be done, but by this way. Because the Lord Jesus pressed through and did not shrink back. So of course the Lord Jesus comes to our side to help you, to help me, and to help us keep going day by day and week by week, striving forward towards the goal. But the key part here in what the Lord by Paul says is that he helps us to do this heartily. We don't lose heart. In fact, he blesses our heart. He enables us to move forward for the glory of his name and for the good of his church by healing and strengthening our hearts. Oh church, isn't that great news that the Lord Jesus doesn't just ask us to do hard things and he doesn't just help us, but he asks us and he helps us to do these hard things by conforming our hearts. To feel the sense of pleasure that he has with us, to feel the sense of love that he has for the church, and to know on account of all that awaits us in the last day when the Lord Jesus comes again with glory to resurrect his church. that we can stand firm today, that we can have our hearts made whole in Christ, knowing exactly what He will do when He comes again. The church shall stand secure. The second thing is in the next verse, verse 2. we will not practice underhanded ways, either by cunning or by tampering with God's Word. We will not do that. If you have been to a show, perhaps at a birthday party or somewhere, and seen a person on the stage who does magic tricks. They pull the rabbit out of the hat, they put the body in the box and thrust all sorts of strange knives through the box, and in the end, the body springs out of the box without holes. at all. Sometimes you see this person that is performing do something and it makes your jaw drop because it seems to be so amazing as if they can bend space. But of course we know the truth. We know that they're really not doing what it appears that they're doing. What they're really doing is using sleight of hand. underhanded ways. They appear to be doing one thing, but in reality, they're doing something else. There's a separate picture that comes to mind. In my hometown, each month of my birthday, each year in the month of my birthday, I should say, the fair came to town. And I always begged my mom and dad to let me go to the fair, but each year it seemed like there were a lot of gunshots that were fired at the fair, and so my parents never let me go. But one year I think I begged hard enough and they finally let me go and I was too small to ride all of the scary rides that now as a parent myself I look at and I think I would never allow my child to go on those because I see the guys that built those. But they did let me go into the house of mirrors. And for those of you who have been into one of these, you know these mirrors that look as though they are true. They appear to be flat, but the way they've been made is with curves and with bends so that you stand in front of them and they make the parts of our Bodies that appear to be small to us at home look very large. I've been told that I have a big head, but when you go into the house of mirrors, your head gets really big. And other parts of us, you know, like our arms or legs that appear to be small are made to look very, very small. And they distort the image that is intended to be seen into something that is designed to make us laugh. Well, the Apostle Paul, as we encountered two weeks ago, is saying that the false teachers that have come into the life of the church are doing something like this. And we know it too, don't we? Churches aren't exempt from these things. There are some pastors that like to ride hobby horses, things in the Word of God that are designed to be small or a third tier. they make to be very large and talk about them all of the time. Almost as if to say that if you aren't in exactly the same space as I am on these very small things, then somehow you are in sin or you're in error. Some other churches and pastors take a very large thing and silence it. or portions of God's Word that they skip and try not to talk about at all. Just in the last two weeks, I heard one of you speaking about a former church that you attended, and you said, we actually really liked that church. We loved all of the people that we knew there, but there was one thing. The minister did not speak about sin. There was no mention of sin, and so there was no need to repent for it. There was no need to beat our chest and cry out before the Lord, woe is me, for I am undone. You see, there is preaching, but it's not preaching. because it skips and it hides and it reduces what the Lord has called us to say. The Lord Jesus, when he was taken by the Spirit of God and placed on that mountain right after he had been baptized and Satan came to him to tempt him, Satan asked the Lord Jesus to do things that Jesus was fully capable of doing. And yet, what was Jesus' response to him? No, no, devil. Has not God said? Does not the Word of God say? And of all people, Jesus, who is the Word of God in the flesh, He did not need to quote the Word of God, and yet it was all that he was. He exuded the Word of God. He relied upon God's Word, and so he spoke all of God's Word in a plain way, even to refute all of the twists and underhanded ways of the devil himself. Well, this brings us to the third point, and it is somewhat of a large point, so don't be concerned that the sermon is short today. Also, from chapter 4, in verse 2, Paul says, but we will do this. We will openly declare the truth. We preach all of God's truth, all 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. We preach them verse by verse with Jesus Christ at the center of every single chapter of every single book. And we aim to do that here in this place publicly. And we aim to do it here in this place plainly. No tricks, no rhetorical skill. but we aim to make the word of God plain to all of our minds so that it will dwell within our hearts. And we even speak it beyond the borders of these walls and compel those who are outside of this space to come in so that the word of God would be intelligent to them. We don't speak Babel in here. We don't speak spiritualese. We don't speak words that are completely unintelligible to those who are not yet born again. No, the Spirit of God intends the Word of God to be spoken plainly for all to hear, for all to understand, and for all to come to saving faith in Christ. And so, we aim to rightly divide the word of truth. We divide it between the first use of the law, which is intended to convict us of sin, to show us that we, in and of ourselves, cannot be good. and can do no good of ourselves before the eyes of God, and we cannot save ourselves. And so the Word of God in this first use of the law drives us outside of ourselves unto Christ, who in his gospel has gone to his cross and has borne all of the guilt of all of our sin, and because he perfectly obeyed the law of God in our place, now in the power of the Spirit, that righteousness which Christ has earned is counted to us who believe upon him. We receive everything that we need before the throne of God from Christ. That is what the gospel is. But then the gospel, of course, brings us right back to the law of God in the third use, which we sing in the hymns, does sweetly comply with the gospel because now we who have been redeemed by Christ are showed by the law how to live, what to do, how to speak words that will glorify God and will please Him. Chapter 4 verse 2, though, is set within a context, within a larger context that spans the second half of chapter 3 of this book into the fourth chapter. And we need to zoom out and to take a look at this context here because it shows us what occurs when pastors and elders preach and teach God's Word in the context of the gathered church. Right here. What's taking place right now and what takes place every Sunday by Sunday as we come to church. And the contrast that is set up here is a contrast between the old covenant and the new. The old dispensation of the proclamation of the gospel by signs and symbols and the new era that is marked by the clarity that we have found in the coming of Christ our Lord. And so Paul appeals here to the portion of God's Word that Kelly read to us as well as to Exodus 34, these two chapters in which we are reminded that the presence of God in the Old Covenant was amongst the people of God. God called Moses, alone, to come by himself up onto Mount Sinai and into the presence of the glory cloud. You recall on the mountain, the presence of God descended upon that place, and the Lord said to Moses, keep the people back. Don't let them get near the base of the mountain. Don't let them touch it lest they die. And as God delivered his law on that place, so there were signs that accompanied the bringing of the law. There were thunderings, there were lightnings, there were terrible signs. But as Moses stood in the presence of God and in the cloud of glory, he received God's word. and the effect shone on his face. Moses' face began to glow as he basked in the presence of God. And then as he prepared to go down to speak God's Word to the rest of the people, he became conscious of the way that his face shone because he had been in the presence of the glory of God. And so he put a veil upon his face so that the people could withstand him, so that they could bear the presence of God that was emblemized on the man's face. Moses covered himself. Then when the tabernacle had been completed according to the specific instruction that God gave, the presence of the glory of God descended upon that place and also within that place. And catch those words, the glory was upon. It was within. It filled that tent. because God was there. The people had done exactly what God had told them to do, and he came to be amongst them, yet in a confined and restrained way. And they saw the glory of the Lord upon and within that place. But now, things have changed. And this is what the Apostle Paul wants for us to know. Now, as the church meets Lord's Day by Lord's Day for worship, as we do here in this place, the Spirit of the Lord is here. Not to bring his law, and not to judge, not to strike with thunder and with lightning lest we run away. No, the Spirit of the Lord has come to announce and declare the gospel so that we who are bound in our sins and weighed down by the guilt of that sin are set free. That's why he says in verse 17, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. The Spirit of the Lord has come today to set the shackles loose from you, to release you from the burden of the law, from all of your old ways, to lift your downcast head and to raise your eyes to look upon Jesus Christ and for the pardon that he brings to every one of you. So lift up your heads. Jesus is here, brought by His Spirit to set you free, church. And the Spirit of God has not descended upon one man and one man alone. The Spirit of God does not descend upon me, or upon Matt, or upon the rest of the elders of this church in a unique way. Look at verse 18 of chapter 3. The text says, no, we all. But we all come into the presence of the glory of God. No priest goes in there on our behalf. The Lord Jesus has brought every one of us into the holy place. in him, by him, because of the sacrifice that he has borne perfectly for sin, because of the blood that he has shed to cleanse us from all of our guilt. He has united us to himself by faith and brought us into the presence, into the glorious place. To behold what? Church, to behold Him. The glory of God does not come to rest upon our church, nor merely to rest within these walls. The glory of God descends in this place every single Sunday to fill you, to fill your heart with the glory of the gospel in the face of Jesus Christ. Not in Moses' face, not in my face, Jesus' face. to direct all of us to behold our Lord Jesus, who is tabernacled amongst us, who has brought the fullness of the presence of God in order to dwell in the midst of his church, so that you might enjoy him. The Sabbath day has been designed by God For you. For your joy. For the fullness of your heart to receive from, to be nourished by, and to be with Jesus Christ. Is that what Sunday is for you? Is that why you've come, my friend? There is more to drink in. There is more to receive in the face of Christ. I don't think Jesus wants his church to be smiley, to put on simplistic smiles as though we've dressed our best and we've come and aren't we cleanly washed people who are upstanding in the society in which we live. No, Jesus Christ has called us to behold him, to gaze upon his face, and to know that on his face there is no longer a frown if you trust in him by faith, but there is a smile on his face. And He wants that smile then to be impressed upon your face and the depth of your being because you know that you have been reconciled to God by Jesus Christ. And there is no more wrath in God nor in hell for you if you trust in Him. You belong to Him. That is the best news in all of the world. That is the best news beyond the world. And when the Lord Jesus comes on the last day, and he causes the new city to descend upon the earth, And when Jesus tells us in the very last book of all of God's Word that we as a church will be gathered round him in that place and there will no longer be the need for the sun by day or the moon by night because he himself will be what? He will be the light. of the city. He will be the glory of the refulgence of the fullness of God dwelling for eternity in the midst of his church. And we have a foretaste of that every single Sunday as the Lord Jesus comes to preach his word to us, as he comes to prepare the table to feed us. And the Lord Jesus himself bids us come. Sinners though we are, washed in his blood, he bids us to come and to eat and to drink and to dine with him and to bask in the fullness of the glory of God in Jesus Christ. What takes place in our church is not a show. This is not a stage. No tricks up here. The same God who formed this entire world and spoke words out of his mouth and said, let the light shine. Has he spoken into your dark heart? Do you need to hear him speak in your heart today? Do you need the glory of the light of the gospel of Christ to come alive inside of you, to burn within you? And for that glory to transform all that you are, every single thing that you do, then I invite you to come receive from Christ. Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you so much that you do not need strong men. You have one strong man, Jesus Christ. And so we thank you for the unspeakable privilege that you have afforded to all of us who are but as jars of clay. to hold within us the wonder of the thrill of the privilege that will be ours forever, to dwell in the glory of our God. Bless us according to these things, we pray, Father, in your Son's name.