You said you would do it forever—and you meant it. Then the job vanished, and suddenly an honest promise looked like a lie. In 2 Corinthians 1, Paul’s critics pressed the same charge over travel plans that fell through: if his word couldn’t be trusted, why trust anything he said about the Gospel? When circumstances overturn the best intentions, where does trust rest?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Hitting milestones makes us think back, doesn’t it? I find myself doing that a lot this year. It’s the 25th anniversary of FaithTree.com this year, and so I find myself thinking back over that, and we have things all over the next year that we’re going to be doing to celebrate that, including Faithtoberfest this coming week. Also, 25 years for the online magazine I write for, Open for Business, and 15 years ago I was just learning what it meant to be a teacher. I was in my first semester teaching at the local college and still trying to figure out how you get tests ready and doing all this stuff, but enjoying every minute of it.
Someone would come to see my new office and maybe see where it was that I was working and hear about it, and they’d ask me about it: “Are you hoping to do this for a little while?” I said, “Yeah, I’m going to do this forever. I’m going to just do this until I retire, and I probably won’t retire. I’ll just keep doing it. I want to be that kind of person.” I loved doing it, and for the time I did it, I did love doing it. But then a giant reorganization came, and through a variety of unfortunate turns with the way the departments were run and so on, I no longer had a position, and I wasn’t doing it any longer. We hit those unexpected turns, and it seems to call into question what we said before, right? “I’m going to do this forever.” Now I’m not doing it forever. That’s the kind of problem Paul was running into with the Corinthians.
Hi, welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad you are here with me tonight as we think about our faithful God. Because we’re talking about His faithfulness, there is someone that you know who needs to hear about His faithfulness, and if you hit that share button, subscribe to our channel, hit the share button, hit the like button— I know you hear every video you watch on YouTube says that, but it actually does something. That’s why they say it. And what could you possibly use those buttons for better than helping people hear about God’s faithfulness? So please go ahead and hit that.
Plans change. I didn’t think I’d be doing a weekly livestream message back then. I thought I’d do some pastoring. I was moving towards ordination, but I was planning to be a full-time teacher, part-time pastor. God had different plans for me. But imagine someone who talked to me 15 years ago shows up today and says, “Tim, you said you were going to teach until you retired. You probably weren’t even going to retire. Now you’re pastoring full-time. You have this church plant and this church family that you’re pastoring. Were you making things up back then? Did you not really mean what you said when you said you were going to be a teacher all your life?” I said, “No, I really meant it.” “But you said you were going to be doing that, and you’re not doing that anymore.”
Now, if you’re watching that kind of conversation, you’d realize, wait a second, this person isn’t being reasonable. It’s not that Tim didn’t want to do that. It’s not that I didn’t want to do that. It’s that the circumstance changed. I wasn’t able to do that. The department was closed. It no longer exists. Things change. Paul had told the Corinthians that he was going to go on a certain itinerary, visit them at a certain time, and things had changed. There were problems in Corinth. He’d gone in at a different time to try to correct that. There were times he was planning to come that he wasn’t able to come. And some of the critics of Paul, some of the other teachers or the people who followed other teachers, were saying, “Listen to Paul. He says he’s going to come and then he doesn’t. He says he’s going to do this and he doesn’t. His yes is no and his no is yes. How can we possibly trust anything he says? If you’re going to listen to what he says about the Gospel, what if he’s making all that up and it’s going to be something different tomorrow?”
How do we make sense of our attempts to be faithful to what we say as humans and our failures there versus God’s faithfulness? That’s what we’re talking about tonight. We’re going to turn back to 2 Corinthians chapter 1 to think about that. And as we do, let’s come before our faithful God in prayer. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for this evening. We thank you for your Word. Would you help us to do your Word, to hold on to your Word, and through every part of what we do, to seek to portray your faithfulness. But even in our weakness, even in our inability to understand exactly what’s going to happen, Lord, would you help us to point to the one who is always faithful? People would know You. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Let’s go ahead and turn to verse 15, chapter 1. We’re picking up where we were because it’s important for us to hear what Paul has to say here because we don’t know how life is going to turn. I didn’t know 15 years ago that I was only going to be primarily a teacher in an educational setting for five years. I thought that was what I was going to do. Paul thought he was going to arrive in Corinth at a certain time. Here’s what he says:
“Because I was sure of this, I wanted to come to you first, so that you might have a second experience of grace. I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia, and to come back to you from Macedonia, and have you send me on my way to Judea.”
Was I facilitating when I wanted to do this? Do I make my plans according to the flesh, ready to say yes, yes, and no, no at the same time? As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been yes and no.
Now, that might seem a little convoluted, but what it seems that Paul is doing here, what commentators think he’s doing, he’s actually quoting maybe a slogan or a phrase that Paul’s critics are using. Paul is the man of yes and no. And so that’s why he’s using that particular phrasing.
We sometimes see this when Paul, quite a bit with the Corinthians in particular, when Paul is confronting a group and their critiques, he uses their language and he responds to it and he says, no, God is faithful. And he’s serious here. He actually invokes an oath of God’s faithfulness. That’s not what we’ve been doing. We haven’t been saying yes out of one corner of our mouths and saying no out of the other.
We see back in 1 Corinthians that Paul lays out his itinerary. That’s in 16:2-8. We’re not going to go read that right now, but you can if you’d like to go and see the broader context. Helpful just to keep in mind, this isn’t a one-off communication with the Corinthians. This is a longtime pastoral relationship he has, and we see that in those letters and the things in between the letters.
So Paul said, here’s how I’m going, and then it hadn’t worked out that way. And he does come back sooner out of pastoral concern. There’s the painful or tearful visit that he comes to confront them, to try to correct them from errors that they’re making. And then when he had planned to come, he doesn’t come. And so some of the Corinthians start to suspect Paul’s word. Does Paul not mean what he says? He says he’s going to do one thing, then he does something else. Maybe Paul is just a con man.
You might say, well, it was just his travel itinerary. Nonetheless, those who want to undermine the other things Paul said could say, well, you can’t go and read the mind of God, but you can see what Paul does with his time and his travel. And so if his travel is off, then it must be that Paul is off in general. Maybe you shouldn’t listen to him. Maybe you should listen to this other teacher who says he’s going to show up and talk to you for X number of coins per day, and he shows up. Yeah, he charges money and Paul doesn’t, but he actually does what he says.
It’s worth asking what Paul’s intent was when he was speaking, and that’s the part they’re ignoring. There was a man whose actions are much better known than his name in the United States, George C. Parker. You may or may not have heard of him, but you almost certainly have heard of something he did.
Parker was something of an early real estate agent, you might say, and he had picked a particular sort of real estate business to specialize in, which was helping people who were immigrating into the United States to find a future income, a future business to buy into, and getting them going with that. He’d meet them, in fact, on the way from Ellis Island. He might be on the ferry or have the ferryman refer those who were coming on the ferry into the mainland to meet him. He’d offer them a business deal.
The only problem was Parker sold things he didn’t own. If you ever had someone say, “If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you,” you can thank Parker for that phrase, because what did he like to sell people? The Brooklyn Bridge. And so he would find an immigrant looking for a business and say, you know, I’m this architect. I build these bridges. He’d rented an actual space where he could have drawings out and so on, look like he was managing all this stuff, and he’d say, but it’s so much work trying to take care of a bridge. And so, one, the immigrant’s trying to find some way to make money in the United States, and presumably he’s targeting immigrants with at least a little bit of means, but he says he would offload the bridge for a great deal because it just was too much hassle with all the business enterprises that he had. “We’ll give them a deal.” And they were basically helping him out by taking it over. So the immigrant would buy the bridge from this alleged bridge builder and go and set up a toll booth on the bridge and soon be very confused when the police came up and confronted him and tried to arrest him for putting an illegal toll booth on the bridge.
Parker did this for decades. He’d eventually get caught, go to jail, come back out. It was actually his fourth time being caught that there had been a new law passed that said if you were caught a certain number of times in a crime in New York, go to prison for life. And that’s ultimately what he did. But not before he sold all kinds of buildings and monuments, Statue of Liberty. He would keep selling these things, finding someone who was an easy mark, who needed to buy something, building up some trust, and then not actually meaning anything he was saying.
I think that’s what some of the Corinthians thought Paul was. And you think about a con man like that, what do they do? They build up the trust. Maybe they even do something beneficial to a person to make it seem like they’re trustworthy. And then at some point, there’s the catch. At some point, there’s the con. And by that point, your defenses are down and you get conned and you buy a bridge.
What bridge was Paul selling them? People were asking. And Paul says, I don’t have a bridge to sell you. You can see how I operate. You can see my funds. You can see everything. I’m open and transparent. And when I said I was coming, I meant I was coming. It hasn’t worked out, but I was operating in good faith.
That’s the key thing here. Paul isn’t any more in control of life itself than we are. And so life was changing here. The Corinthians had a crisis. He came. Other places had a crisis, or there were challenges in travel, or there was persecution, and the plans changed. But what Paul is saying to them is, when I said I was coming, I meant I was coming. It hasn’t worked out how I hoped, but I meant I was coming. I was operating in good faith.
That’s the challenge, I think, for us. There are going to be times we say something, and it doesn’t work out the way we hoped, when we hoped. We plan to arrive in Corinth in March, and we don’t get there until November. But the question is, were we operating in good faith when we said we were coming in March?
Now, we should be reflective on this, right? Because there are times that we aren’t very thoughtful, even if we’re operating in good faith. We’re being reckless. We say we can do something, and we should have not assumed it would work quite that well. We didn’t provide for any cushion. We didn’t provide for anything going wrong. I’ve done this. It’s easy to just want to be optimistic. And so there’s that challenge.
But beyond that, the question should be, when we say something, do we intend to do it? Do we mean to do it? And do we do our best to try to do it? Something can happen. Something happened to Paul here. But the important thing was that Paul intended to do what he was saying he was going to do. It wasn’t a fake yes. Yes, I’ll come back. I really mean no. He didn’t have his fingers crossed so that he didn’t have to do it. He meant it. Life just got in the way.
Paul wants to be very clear. He’s been meaning to. He’s been intending to. And Paul ultimately is going to fulfill what he said he was going to do. It just hasn’t happened how he had hoped. It isn’t that he was failing to try. He wasn’t a George Parker out there selling things that were never his to sell. So he always knew it was going to fall through. 100% Parker was under no illusion that he could sell the Brooklyn Bridge. He knew he couldn’t. Anyway, Paul really thought he could be back in Corinth. And so he was trying. It wasn’t working out.
Here’s the other key thing, though, as we think about our Christian witness and how we communicate who God is, is that, for one, no matter how hard we try, there are going to be times where we intend to do something and it doesn’t happen. We’ve all been there. And it’s embarrassing if we take seriously what we say. It’s embarrassing and it’s uncomfortable and we wish it weren’t so.
But that’s one of the reasons why we need to try so hard not to point to ourselves but to God. Because the good news is that even when our plans waver, and this is what Paul moves on to, God’s plans don’t. Verse 19:
“For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not yes and no, but in Him it is always yes.”
God’s plans do not change. Our plans do.
We think we know what’s going on. It doesn’t happen.
It’s also 25 years ago today that my grandpa passed. And I think about that date and all the things he was planning to do. I can sometimes look through a box of something he packed and see the things he planned to do, usually for all of us, some wonderful plan that he didn’t get to finish. He didn’t know when his time was. But what you can see, absolutely, and what he left is that everything he was planning to do, he really was planning to do it. Everything he was planning to do, he really was planning to do it. It was all in good faith. He didn’t have control over when he got sick. But as long as he had the ability, he was going to do.
And that’s our calling. What God’s calling is, is to actually fill out the plan. He actually gets everything done. And the good news then is that when we do confront the pain of life and death right there in the midst of it, and we say, well, if our plans don’t always come through, do God’s? When He says that we will see our loved ones again, does that actually happen? His yes is unwavering. That’s what Paul says. Always yes. God doesn’t get busy and doesn’t get sick and doesn’t die.
We’re not going to find clearing out an area that God was working in a box where God’s plans were, He was working on something but didn’t get to finish it because He grew ill. That’s not going to happen. God does what He says He’s going to do. He’s both acting in good faith, as we hope to do, as my grandpa did, and He also is the one who’s actually in control of every aspect.
Paul’s problem is he’s not in control of everything. He wasn’t in control of all kinds of circumstances around him, both in his own life and in the lives he was ministering to, that could get in the way of what otherwise would have been the right plan. And God sometimes leads us and makes clear where the next step is, but sometimes we’re trying to figure it out and we make a mistake or we think we understand and then He corrects us and so we may have to change what we’re doing. But that’s because we’re drawing closer to the unchanging plan of God.
God is all-knowing. God is all-powerful.
One of the challenges is that we often don’t know what something involves. There are plenty of projects that anyone who is a person that likes to embark on a project—and it’s something I definitely got from my grandpa to come up with these different ideas I want to do—I don’t always know the full cost of the project when I embark on it. And sometimes that means it takes longer than I anticipated, or some of those things we’ll see when I get them done, if I get them done, because they’re much larger than I anticipated.
I don’t always know the cost, and I’m not always good at figuring that out either. God knows, and so God says He’s going to do it, and He knows exactly what it’s going to take, and He’s already willing to take every aspect of that as He embarks on it. That’s so crucial to understand. He always, always does.
Sometimes we need to adjust. Verse 23, we’re just going to jump there. We’ll be back there, but I want to jump there tonight for us for just a moment.
There was a time where the Corinthians needed to respond to what Paul had written, and it wasn’t necessarily going to be helpful. It was only going to cause more hard feelings for Paul to be there. Paul didn’t know that originally.
We can say, “But God has been guiding me here,” and I understood that what I thought was the right thing to do wasn’t at that time, at least. It doesn’t mean that Paul doesn’t want to see them again. Quite the contrary. But that the timing that he thought was right was not right, and so he had to adjust to what God’s intention was.
And so, here’s the key thing. Paul doesn’t say, “God’s plan changed. God had me coming, and then God changed His mind, and then He didn’t have me coming.” So Paul wants to be very clear. God always had this plan. I’m being refined and conformed to God’s plan, which means what I intended to do isn’t necessarily what I should do in this moment. It’s not the right thing for me to do. It wouldn’t be the pastorally caring and loving thing for me to do.
The key thing, and that’s what he’s urging them to do, is to see where they should put their trust. It wasn’t in Paul. He’s not saying, “I’m an unfaithful mess that you shouldn’t ever trust anything I say.” He’s not saying that, but he’s saying, don’t base your security of your faith and your salvation on me. Base it on God Himself.
I’m still being conformed. At times, I’m going to have to change. But you know what? You know who doesn’t? God Himself. It’s always about Him because He already knows everything involved.
I mentioned a few weeks ago my enjoyment of Kickstarter. It’s a fascinating website if you haven’t checked it out. Different inventors, sometimes individuals, sometimes companies, will come up with an idea that is too costly to try to do without having people already buy into it. And so some of the things even we use for our livestream and so on here at Little Hills have been non-existent products that someone came up with the idea and signed up and you pay for it and then you wait a year or two sometimes, hopefully get the product.
Sometimes, though, you sign up and you don’t get anything because the person never intended to do it. They put up a giant smoke screen. They were the George Parkers of the present age, and they were selling Brooklyn Bridges. It did sound too good to be true, or it sounded at least really, really good, and they run off with the money and disappear.
And Kickstarter is very clear that they can’t guarantee any of the people that are producing something on there. They won’t let them keep doing it and scam people, but you have a new inventor, unproven record. There’s some risk to it. And even when the person is known to be reliable, there’s risk to it because if they’re actually embarking on something that genuinely needs this process, guess what? They haven’t made it yet. They haven’t started the factory yet. They haven’t gone through everything yet because they need to know that people are going to buy into it first, and sometimes something goes wrong partway through.
There was a Kickstarter a few years ago from a reputable group that I’d signed up for that was right before the pandemic. And when everything went haywire, production went haywire, factories shut down, and everything else, the money that would have been enough if everything had gone smoothly was no longer enough to get through it. So you have the outright con men. You have those who are well-intentioned but may or may not have planned enough to deal with it. And then you have those that actually come through.
And that’s been generally my experience on there. There’s a reason I actually like the place. It’s not always ripping you off. But as to say, the very concept of it speaks to the inability of us, even in our best moments, to guarantee an outcome. We can try, but there are a lot of uncertainties that are going to arise. There are a lot of challenges that we can’t anticipate, like a global pandemic. And those may play into it. And you have to kind of accept that.
And if I’m going there and buying something, I’m putting my trust in that person or that company, and I have to accept that.
Paul says, though, is don’t do that with ministry. When you’re joining a church, when you’re following a ministry, when you’re listening to livestream messages, don’t put your faith capital… don’t buy into me. Don’t buy into me, Tim, here. Or any pastor. Or any church. Yes, yes, it’s good if we anchor down into a church home. If you’re part of the Little Hills family already, I’m so glad. And if you’re not, I hope you will. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that your faith is based on Little Hills or on me. Don’t do that.
Because just like Paul, and like every other human being, I don’t know exactly how the future’s going. I can’t. And I pray that I always act in good faith. That’s my aim. I want to. But that doesn’t mean I’m always going to get everything right. I’m not. But I pray that I always communicate that where your trust should be isn’t in me, but in God. And whether or not I say that, that’s what you need to know and how you need to act.
We do what’s set before us. Paul, to the best he could, ministered to the Corinthians. The Kickstarter that raises funds, hopefully, if it’s acting in good faith, goes and tries to build the thing that it’s promised to build. And all of us, as individuals, there are things set before us where people have trusted in us and asked us to do things. We’re duty-bound to do things. We’re employed to do things. We should do those things. We should aim to be known as people of good faith that do the things we say we’re going to do. That’s what we should aim to do.
But all the while, we need to point to God as the one who actually is faithful.
So I think there’s really a dual challenge here as we think about our lives. First, being faithful to our God means being faithful to our Word, being faithful to those around us. And so we should aim to be. Every time we’re not, even when it is of the best intention, someone’s going to question just as Paul’s critics questioned.
And so whenever possible, you know, Paul wasn’t trying to end up in this situation. Whenever possible, we should avoid those situations. We should seek to simply make our yes, yes, and then do yes. Right? Make our no, no, and then do no. Whatever it is that we say, if we can possibly do it, we do it. That’s the best case.
But all the way, we should be humble and willing to admit when our yeses turn to nos and our nos turn to yeses that we’re fallible, that we’re imperfect. And it’s not about us being perfect. It’s about Him being perfect and gradually making us more perfect.
God calls us and He is always faithful. And our job is the same one that Paul had. It’s to be people of good faith with the faithful. When we do that, God shares His Gospel through us. And people see someone far more faithful than we could ever be.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, we do pray that you would guide us and that you would help us to be people of good faith. That you would make our yes, yes, and our no, no. That certainly, when we have the opportunity, that we would say what we intend to do, not what seems good to do. That we wouldn’t be people, please. That’s certainly tempting. But Lord, would you help us to actually say and then do? But Lord, would you also help us to be humble, that when we say and intend and life gets in the way, that we would both own it, we seek to do the best we can to be faithful in that, and that through our whole lives, that we’re not pointing to ourselves, but we’re pointing to you, so that even when we have to course-correct, like Paul did here, that we’re still pointing to you.
It’s a beautiful thing about what we find in your Word. We find all in human individuals being guided by a God who is always faithful, and help us to be representatives of you in the exact same way we pray. We ask this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Well, I hope this has been an encouragement to you, and if it has, please do give us a like or a share. We are always faithful. We aren’t always able to do everything, but God is, and that’s the message that we want to get out, and the message, hopefully, we do every week. That’s our very name, Steadfast, referring to God’s steadfast love. He is the one who is always faithful, not us. But we’re the ones being loved by Him and being called to share His love in this world.
If there’s any way I can pray for you this week, or we as a church can, you can use our texting line on screen, 833-356-4032. That’s 833-356-4032. Or you can use the comments below if you’d like to just post publicly. Either way, it’d be great to get to pray with you.
Hope you have a wonderful and blessed week, and here’s something that will bless your week. Let me encourage you to join us for Faithtoberfest. That’s this Friday. This Friday, 6:30 p.m., is going to be the dinner and games if you’re coming in person. It’ll be about, I want to say, 7:30, 7:45, that we have our livestreamed Festival of Worship and Music. And so that will be a little bit later.
So if you’re coming online, we’ll get the livestream up as early as possible so you can just kind of park there, and you won’t miss it when it’s ready. Maybe have a hot dog yourself ready, and, I don’t know, do your biblical and your sudoku. You should do biblical over at faithtree.com. 25th anniversary, right? But you should have some fun, and then join us. We can all be together online and in person when it comes to about 7:30, 7:45.
And as always, Faithtoberfest will have some prizes, and we’ll have games that both those in person and online can participate in during that latter portion. I’m going to be posting a link online later tonight as well. If you go to our social media, you can click that, sign in ahead of time so you’re ready for the games, and also you’ll have a unique referral link. If you invite someone else, you already get extra prize tickets for those prizes.
So, please do do that. And then invite, encourage those people you invite to pass out their referral code. Yeah, it’s a little bit like a pyramid scheme, but isn’t it great when it’s a pyramid scheme all about having more people hear about Jesus’ faithfulness because He is not a pyramid scheme at all. So, please do share those referral codes.
Anyway, that’s this Friday night. Hope you do invite friends, and I hope that you’re there. In the meantime, have a wonderful and blessed week, and I’ll see you again very soon.
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