We’ve all felt the temptation, after someone has been called out for sin, to just leave them there and be done with it. But in 2 Corinthians 2, Paul tells the Corinthians this punishment is enough—now they need to forgive and comfort the one they punished.
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Good evening, and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad that you are here tonight. I want to start off by thanking everyone for the prayers yesterday. It was definitely a scary day, and I certainly appreciate my church family surrounding all of us and praying for my mom. She is home, thankfully, sore, and it’s always nerve-wracking to go into the hospital unexpectedly. So thank you so much for the prayers. Thank you to everyone for stepping up and doing everything so that there was still a service last night, and that the family could be together, and knowing that you were praying the whole time means so much. So thank you for that.
I just wanted to say that before we jump into tonight’s message, so just thank you and appreciate your continued prayers because we still don’t have all the answers, but I sure appreciate my church family and love all of you and thank you for that.
It wasn’t exactly how I was planning to go into this opening illustration tonight for our passage as we continue in 2nd Corinthians chapter 2. But I was going to talk about how things don’t always play out the way that we think they’re going to, certainly how it was over the last day. And also how, this was where I was playing to get all, how it’s worked out for Red Lobster.
If you know anything about Red Lobster, you know one of the things that people talk a lot about Red Lobster these days over the last period is their unlimited shrimp meals. I’ve never actually tried it, but they have the unlimited shrimp meals. And if I were going to Red Lobster, I’ll always order Walt’s favorite shrimp. That was just what I’d get. But a lot of people love to go, and you can get all the different kinds, and you can get as much as you want.
It draws a lot of people into the restaurant. And so they do it as a special promotion every so often because it seemed like a good way to draw people in. And indeed, it reminds people that Red Lobster exists. It seems like it’s kind of forgotten a lot these days, and oh yeah, they have that promotion; we’ll show up.
Well, right around the middle of the pandemic when a lot of restaurants were suffering, Red Lobster had one of its suppliers of shrimp buy a significant stake in the company. I think even a majority stake where they could actually influence what Red Lobster did. And they decided two things. One, they liked that promotion because it reminded people of Red Lobster. But also, because restaurants were having a hard time, it was a great way to unload extra shrimp.
So they said let’s just have unlimited shrimp all the time. Well, great for the supplier, who wanted to get rid of this extra shrimp. Not so great for Red Lobster because Red Lobster didn’t offer unlimited shrimp because they made so much money selling unlimited shrimp, but because it got people back into the habit of coming to Red Lobster so they’d come back and order something they actually made money off of. They don’t make money off of unlimited shrimp because the shrimp costs more than what many customers will eat.
By making it a permanent feature, the shrimp supplier was doing great at selling shrimp. They were driving Red Lobster into bankruptcy because it couldn’t afford to do it. And so that’s what’s happened over time. It seemed like a good plan here. It seemed like they were getting ahead. The customers loved it. What’s not to love?
Well, there were all these things creeping underneath this undercurrent of sin, so to speak, that was going to put the restaurant in terrible shape. Not only did they go into bankruptcy, they also had their shareholders, the other shareholders, sue the shrimp supplier for driving the company into bankruptcy.
That’s sort of what Paul has us thinking about tonight. We’re going to turn here to 2nd Corinthians chapter 2, verse 5. Paul writes, “Now, if anyone has caused pain, he caused it not to me, but in some measure—not to put it too severely—to all of you. For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough.”
Paul’s going to have us thinking about what is enough and what’s the point of the things we do. And we’re going to see how that turns into a matter of eating too much shrimp in just a moment. But before we do, let’s go ahead and pray and ask for God’s guidance. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Lord, would you comfort us with it? Would you strengthen us with it? Would you encourage us, and would you help us to be people who are people of encouragement and not discouragement? People who live like those who have the gospel transforming us and giving us hope, not those who live by the rules of the world. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Sin affects everyone, and that’s the first part of what Paul’s addressing here. We’ve seen this underlying theme: there’s sin going on in the church at Corinth. We know that Paul withheld his trip; he had to deal with that. We looked at that at the end of chapter one because he needed to write a letter disciplining them, correcting them on what they were doing, and he realized it was better not to be there at the time but to save his visit for a time they could rejoice together, not a time when hard things needed to be set.
And so we’ve been going around this matter of how correction plays out, how it should affect us and the people being corrected, all these different things. But now we get to another part. Not everyone was doing everything that Paul needed to correct. In fact, some of the people were very much listening to Paul, and Paul, when he’d written, had called them to correct the people who were sinning.
We’ve seen that as a recurring problem in the Corinthian church, that there’s sin going on, and they just let it fester. So Paul told them, “You need to deal with this,” and apparently they had. And part of it, probably the reason they were willing to listen to Paul, is that this sin had affected all of them.
Now, maybe some of that effect was that Paul didn’t come, but there were probably also just effects of the sin itself, different things rippling throughout the community. And so what looks like maybe it’s just an impact in one spot had an impact in all kinds of spots, sort of like how Red Lobster going into bankruptcy affected Red Lobster itself, and ultimately affected the shrimp supplier because you can’t squeeze money out of a company you’re driving into bankruptcy, so you’re going to get hurt.
They end up having to write off their investment in Red Lobster ultimately. But it also affected all the other suppliers and all the other people involved. Sin has that rippling effect. And so that short-sighted, it seems to be working sin path doesn’t actually keep working.
So Paul calls them, as we see in verse 9: “But this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything.” And they were, they clearly disciplined the sinner, the people doing whatever it was—we don’t have all the details—but doing the things that were displeasing to God—they had been corrected.
Clearly, this reminds us sin ripples. Sin can’t be contained. We can’t have neat little sin boxes and say, “Well, this is over here; it’s not causing any problem.” For one, we’re not very good judges of that. I don’t think that shrimp supplier thought they were going to drive Red Lobster into bankruptcy. That would be kind of stupid, wouldn’t it? Even if a supplier would be willing to do that if they didn’t actually own a major stake in a company.
If you actually have invested in it, well, to get the money out so that you can lose all the money you put in, it’s not the smartest thing. But that’s how we invest in sin. Like, “Okay, I know maybe it’s doing damage here, but it’s doing so much benefit over there,” and we don’t come to understand, “Wait a second. No, it’s doing more harm than good. It’s not working.”
And so the Corinthians needed to fix a number of things: one, the direction, but also the fact that they were just kind of letting it go out and poison the church. This is not good. And it’s correcting different matters, right? There’s the sense we should have what’s good and right and pure in God’s eyes and value that so much that we fight for it and insist on it.
But also we should understand that it’s doing other damage. We’re spiritually bankrupting the church when we don’t care about what’s good and true. Yet, at the time, it sometimes seems like, “It’s okay. It’s not that big a deal. Things are going smoothly enough, the customers are coming back, and we’re getting the job done.”
It’s the same sort of thing that quite literally spilled over here in the St. Louis area over the last half-century. If you are in this region, you surely know about all the controversy around different radioactive materials that were spilled in the time preparing for World War II and beyond, when they built all kinds of manufacturing here, some of it in the city itself. They had to figure out what to do with, for example, uranium.
They took some of it to North County and it went into Coldwater Creek. Now, for example, 40, 50, 60 years later, you can find that those who were growing up at the time when they were doing this have astronomically higher chances of getting all kinds of horrible cancers than people who didn’t live in that area.
Well, how’d that happen? And why were they being so careless? One of the things with not extreme radiation poisoning, right—not exposed to a meltdown at a power plant or something—but just being exposed at levels in drinking water, it usually doesn’t make you terribly sick right away.
Imagine for a moment, you’re Mallinckrodt Chemical Corporation. You’ve produced all of this material for the government, and you need to figure out what to do with the waste products, and you don’t know what to do with the waste products, or you’re moving facilities. You think, “Well, we just need to get it out of here because we need to make money.” It’s the big priority.
If you’re in charge of the company, you need to make sure it can still produce what it needs to and make some money. So yes, they knew radioactive material is dangerous, but really that dangerous? Maybe not. Maybe you can allow it to keep going here. And so that’s exactly what they did. They loaded it into uncovered dump trucks and hauled it away.
Well, what does an uncovered dump truck full of nuclear waste do? It spreads out as the truck’s moving along. There were all kinds of areas around the St. Louis area that were contaminated. They weren’t necessarily a dump site; they were just in the path to where the uranium was going.
They didn’t really realize this for decades, at least not to the extent of how bad it was. In 1973, you’d think by then they might have known, but no. In 1973, they were running these uncovered dump trucks hauling the waste.
When you hear about the Superfund site around Coldwater Creek or the Bridgeton landfill that has the seemingly eternal fire with radioactive waste, these things were happening for decades. People weren’t questioning it, at least any real degree, because it got the problem solved. You can get the waste out of the way and keep doing your business.
It didn’t have effects immediately, and so you look away. It’s not until that 2025 study that we know there’s a 40 to 60% increase in cancer for those who were born in 1960 in the area affected. It is a long time. Think about that. So easy to overlook it.
That’s exactly the problem that Paul’s addressing here. It looks like sin is just working. When we feel like we can gain from sin, even if we know it’s kind of bad or kind of sloppy, we don’t see the aftermath because it’s on delay. And it’s so hard to deal with things that are on delay.
What do we do? We just overlook it, pretend it’s not going to happen, and then the consequences crop up. That’s what Paul is trying to help the Corinthians see here. They need to deal with that sin. They are dealing with it.
Now, you might say, “Why are we talking about all this because they listened to Paul?” Well, now they need to deal with the counter response then. Because it seems like, “Well, if sinners do all this, they’re hauling dump trucks of uranium through our lives and spreading out all this sin, then all we need to do is punish those stupid sinners for their stupid stupidity.”
Right? Done. Paul says no. Here’s the temptation: If you respond to them, you’re going to sin. And you know what? That sin is bad too. All sin is bad. There isn’t sin that’s “well, it’s not so bad.” It’s okay; it’s sin. All sin is bad. All sin is worthy of death.
So when we fall into the trap, “Well, we can punish,” and yeah, maybe if you really push on it, it seems like maybe we’re talking about sin here, but we can do it because we’re punishing those who spread the radioactive waste all over the place—not quite that simple.
Paul’s going to go on and say, “You know those people I said you needed to punish, that you need to correct, now you need to comfort them.”
Paul goes into perhaps the hardest part of this whole process if we’re going to act like Christians about it. Take a look at verse 6: “For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough.”
Why is it enough? “So that you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed with excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him. For this is why I wrote that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything.”
“Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs.”
What are you talking about here, Paul? You told us to correct the sinners, and now you’re saying we need to comfort them?
We often sing that beautiful hymn, “Come Ye Sinners,” and that’s God’s message to us. He comforts us. He calls us as we sit, and He calls us to do the same for others that He does for us.
Why? Because of the risk of despair. Here’s the thing that is at risk: When we recognize sin and we point out sin, we can drive people not to repentance but to despair.
It’s the difference, if you think about it, between Peter and Judas. Peter and Judas did very similar things for their own necks or their own benefit. They both denied Jesus in different ways. And yes, Judas did take money for it. But is Peter really any better for having three different opportunities to say, “Yeah, I’m with Jesus,” instead denying Him? No.
What’s the difference then? Judas realizes he did wrong, and he’s driven to despair, and he’s driven away from God. Satan gets a hold of him, and it’s purely hopeless.
Peter, despite failing three times and even being warned ahead of time that he was going to do it, did it anyway—something that Judas didn’t even have going for him. Peter is told you’re going to do this, and he does it. But Peter comes back to Jesus. Jesus comforts him. He restores him.
The fellow disciples don’t look at him and say, “You’re the denier. Don’t want anything to do with you.” Peter is still clearly part of the group.
This is the critical thing that often gets missed: We are in the restoration business. What we talked about last week, not the despair-inducing business.
It’s one of the reasons why we have to be so careful when we speak of God’s law to people who aren’t yet believers. It’s not that we should deny that God’s law is true and always true and not somehow subjectively true, but what’s good according to God is always good.
If you tell people the law but they don’t yet have the hope of God’s forgiveness, you’re not helping them draw toward our God unless you make sure that they also hear that God forgives them.
If they just hear, “This thing you’re doing or that thing you’re doing is bad, it’s evil, it’s horrible,” maybe they actually feel their conscience apply that, and they say, “Yeah, it is horrible, and I’m a horrible person, and I’d probably be better off if I weren’t even around to be horrible.”
That is not what we’re called. We’re called to help people see that they’re loved and valued by God. Yes, they’ve done horrible things. We’ve all done horrible things, but God loves them. God loves us, and God restores us.
Paul says here that the real risk—and this is the risk for all of us all the time—is that Satan loves to say, “Okay, so you realize that the sin you’re doing is bad? Well then think how bad you are. You should just give up because there’s nothing that can be done here. You are wicked.”
I’ve shared stories before of people who’ve gotten to that point where they believe that they’ve done bad but they no longer believe that God can redeem them.
That is truly tragic, and that’s something that we don’t want to be a part of.
Yes, we point out sin, but our goal isn’t primarily to point out sin; our goal is to point to Jesus. And to the extent that we point out sin, it’s doing one of two things.
Amongst other believers, it is to keep the church pure and to keep those ripples from spiritually bankrupting the body of Christ.
I mean, we can’t really bankrupt Christ’s body, but we can weaken it. We can cause a local church or the larger church to be weaker. We can get in the way instead of being instruments of God’s work.
So that’s the first use. That’s the important part of what we need as Christians: to be refined and called to be more like Him.
But the second one, when we’re sharing the gospel, when we’re talking about the gospel publicly and God’s word publicly, is to make sure that we use God’s law as a pointer to redemption.
And so often—and I think this is perhaps one of the most profound and dangerous things I see in the church today—we are really good at times of speaking of what God says is right and wrong and not making sure that it is heard that God has a solution for it.
A lot of people could tell you exactly what Christians think are right and wrong in our society, but if you get to hot button issues of what’s right and what’s wrong—and that’s good when we’re clear—they probably would not be able to tell you what they’re supposed to do about it.
They probably say, “Well, maybe I need to try to be a better person.” That is a death sentence.
We need to keep that in mind. When we speak the truth, make sure we speak the truth pointing to Jesus, not just pointing to how wrong people are.
Paul says here, “Don’t let Satan get another opportunity.”
In the Corinthian church, there are people now who have felt the anger of the community, who have felt separated from the community, who hopefully know that they’ve done wrong.
But if you just leave them there, Satan’s going to take advantage of that, not because they’re unrepentant necessarily, but because they’re unhopeful.
We need to make sure that hope is always here.
And so Paul, even as the wrong was seemingly primarily directed at Paul—maybe people were accusing him of being a false teacher, maybe they were trying to get people to follow a different apostle or a different early Christian teacher instead of Paul—maybe they’re doing all this.
And so Paul says, “You know, it was done against me, but I forgive them, and I want you to forgive them too. If you forgive them, I’m going to forgive them right there with you, because what I don’t want, what I care about most, is not what they did to me, but that the body of Christ is whole and healthy and reflecting Jesus.”
And that’s exactly what Satan doesn’t want. Satan wants us broken. Satan wants those gaping wounds that say, “Yeah, there was sin here, and there was sin here.”
What Jesus wants us to say is, “Look how I heal sin. Let me show that in your lives, both individually and as a church.”
It’s kind of funny. Sometimes I think we have a hard time getting this concept at a smaller level, like what we interact with every day, but most people can get it if we read history.
For example, think about the end of World War I, a truly, truly horrific war. It’s hard to say that there were many wars, if any wars, that were outright more purely horrific than World War I.
Because as horrible as every war is—and wars are horrible—the idea of a whole generation of young men lining up in trenches that basically didn’t move for years and gassing each other to death, there aren’t even grand sweeping moments where people were able to heroically stand against this.
We think about when we honor different parts of World War II. For example, you have D-Day or some other moments where you can see this movement to break the tide of evil.
World War I feels so incredibly pointless across the board because it just sat there and people died and died and died.
So it’s very easy to understand that when it was over, those who were on the victor’s side wanted to exact what they could from those on the losing side, and they did. The Treaty of Versailles made sure that the Germans and the other central powers were going to get their comeuppance for all the damage they had done, and they deserved it. They utterly deserved it.
When you think about the horrific acts of the Axis powers in World War II, which multiplied the scale of the amount of evil inflicted on the world, how much more so should they have done the same thing after World War II?
But they didn’t. Why didn’t they?
Well, it’s that thing that I said that we can look back in history and see: The Treaty of Versailles so crippled countries like Germany, in trying to exact revenge, you know what they did? They encouraged what ultimately led to World War II.
Because the people became so hopeless, so despondent, even if they didn’t really support what their government had done and really did think it was a pointless war—and I think they probably did—they started to feel more and more resentment, and they started to listen to voices that spoke evil that would quench the resentment.
Because those voices of evil said, “Here’s a solution to your hopelessness.”
And that’s what Satan does. That is what Paul is dealing with here.
Maybe there were trenches where people were gassed, so to speak. In the Corinthian church, deep, deep wounds, deep, deep breaks, things that threaten the church.
But Paul says the solution to that is not to leave everything in a permanent state of brokenness. The point is, as Christians, to see that brokenness restored.
And I would imagine for a lot of people after World War II, when the Marshall Plan was implemented, and you saw this effort to actually restore the countries that had done so much evil to us and to other allied countries, there were probably a lot of people who thought that really didn’t sound right.
But look at the fruit of it: Instead of having another war within a few decades, two of those Axis powers—Germany and Japan—are now two of the most successful countries in the world.
Take the top five countries by gross domestic product. Japan and Germany are right there in that top five alongside the United States and China because they were rebuilt.
And what did they do with that rebuilt effort? They became friends of ours rather than resentful enemies.
Japan has cooperated with us more than most countries. Why? Because we rebuilt them and fostered restoration rather than permanent brokenness.
And that, on a big worldwide level, is what we’re called to do as Christians: to take the Axis powers of our lives and see them turned into friends, to see them where we can serve together.
How many decades now have American and Japanese soldiers served together in peaceable efforts to encourage a world that is less hostile rather than more so?
How did that happen? Because someone said, “What we don’t need is to spare cause through revenge, but healing through restoration.”
If worldly powers, at times—very rarely—but in that moment, could get that, how much more so should we as Christians who are those living in restoration through Jesus?
How can we go from, “It serves you right,” to “How can I serve you?” Who’s in the wrong?
Now, this is not to say we never try to correct. That wasn’t Paul’s point. They had tried to correct. That was the right thing. You do stand up, and you do make the point, but you don’t want to encourage permanent brokenness.
But restoration, just as Jesus did with Peter, because we’re all Peters at some points in our lives, and we’re all those who have the opportunity to restore Peter at another time.
Paul says, “Let the body of Christ actually be a testimony of healing, not brokenness.”
Sin should move the sinner. But we are called to be instruments that move the sinner back to Jesus and healing and forgiveness, not moving the sinner to just despondency.
Because Jesus doesn’t leave us when we’re sinners. He doesn’t leave any of them as their sinners, wherever they may be.
And so we, as the body of Christ, are called to be where Jesus is, not where we want to be. We’re not ignoring problems, but we need to understand sometimes when we’re trying to deal with sin, we have a big crate of shrimp that isn’t selling.
The solution isn’t to cause more sin to get rid of it, because ultimately that’s going to cause an even bigger problem.
Here’s the beauty of forgiveness. Think about it. What do we live as Christians to do? We’re looking forward to the return of Jesus and how we will dwell in eternity with our brothers and sisters in Christ who have been redeemed by the blood of the Savior.
Every time that we actually live that forgiveness and act like that’s what really, really, really matters, do you know what we’re doing? We’re giving a taste of eternity to this world.
The world doesn’t normally see that. How can we exemplify that today?
Would you pray with me?
Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Would you help us to be those who serve up that taste of forgiveness, that beauty of forgiveness that You serve to us? Lord, this is hard, and we don’t like doing it. We don’t want to do it.
We can think of a thousand reasons why we shouldn’t do it. But help us to restore our former enemy combatants.
Lord, You don’t want a church of different enemy camps. You want a body that testifies to how You heal those who are Your enemies.
Lord, thank You for forgiving us when we were Your enemies, when we were those who were sinning and continue even to sin.
Sin that cost an unfathomable price. Would You help us to look at that price and to live in the truth of what You have done for us?
We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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It’s such a joy to pray for each other. It’s how we avoid despondency. We pray for each other. We’re reminded that God’s people are drawn together, and we encourage each other. So please, please do take advantage of that as well.
We do have a brand new series. It both started yesterday, but as I said, things don’t go quite as planned. So you saw it pop up: “They’re unfaithful.” We’re going to begin that this Sunday at 5:30 PM, both in person and online. So please join us however you can as we look at the beginning of the Book of Judges. I’m looking forward very much to doing that with you this Sunday.
In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week, and I’ll see you again very soon.
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