2 Corinthians 1:12-14

What does it look like to do relationships as a New Covenant partner with God? In this message from 2 Corinthians 1:12–14, Pastor Josh Turansky explores how Paul relates to a hurting, suspicious church with a clear conscience, godly sincerity, and transparent communication. Paul doesn’t just do ministry; he narrates his motives, his decisions, and his hope for the Corinthians all the way to “the day of our Lord Jesus.” Through Paul’s example, we learn how the New Covenant reshapes our inner life, our words, and our long‑term vision for family, friendships, and church—so that, one day, our relationships themselves become something we can rejoice in before Christ.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good boasting. Before we talk about this text, I just again want to put it in front of you that God made you a blessable image-bearing covenant partner. Alright, let me just put the scriptures up in front of you that help make this clear. When you go to Genesis chapter 1, verse 27 and 28, it says, God created man in his own image. There's the image-bearing part. You were designed by God to bear his image. It says in verse 28, then after God made them, he blessed them, right? That's how we get blessable image-bearing. What about the covenant partner piece? I want to put in front of you the passage out of Jeremiah. Again, here's the question. What does it look like to be a new covenant partner with God? Because you notice in our little catchphrase that you're a covenant partner, you're designed to be a covenant partner with God. What covenant? Are you relating to God according to the Adamic covenant? Are you relating to God according to the Noahic covenant, the Mosaic covenant? No, you're relating to God according to the new covenant. Well, you're like, well, Josh, what's the new covenant? I'm glad you asked. I'm glad you asked. Because here in Jeremiah 31, the prophet spoke of, here is what the new covenant will be. He says, Look, in the days coming, this is the Lord's declaration, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. You see it? There's that Spanish word. Pacto, right? I'm going to make a new covenant. This is not going to be, look at it, it's not going to be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand, led them out of Egypt. It's not going to be the Moses covenant. No, this covenant is going to be a new one. My covenant they broke, even though they, even though I am their master. This is the Lord's declaration. Okay, verse 33. Here's the new covenant. Instead, this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days. This is the Lord's declaration. There's three parts. See if you can find the three parts. I will put my teaching within them and write it on their hearts. That's point one. Where did God write his laws under Moses?

unknown 2:39

On stones.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

On stones. But here he's saying, I'm going to teach them within them. It goes from being an external work to an internal work. Under the new covenant, God's working in us, not just putting the scriptures on our foreheads, not just writing it on tablets of stone. He's putting it in us. No longer will each one teach his neighbor or his brother. This is part two. Okay? You're not having to go to a high priest and have him teach you and intermediate for you to know the Lord. What does he say? For they will know me from the least to the greatest. That's where we get this idea of a personal relationship with God, is right from this passage. You're no longer dependent on a priest to have a relationship with God because Jesus is your high priest so that you can be there right with him. And the third part here, this is the Lord's declaration, for I will forgive their iniquity and never again remember their sin. Third part of the new covenant is the forgiveness of sins. He's taken and he washes your sin away because of the work that Jesus did on your behalf. So you are a blessable, image-bearing, covenant partner. When we get into the book of 2 Corinthians, one of the things that we're seeing is that Paul, the apostle, is writing to a church that he planted, and he's not relating to them according to Moses' law. Instead, he's doing the relationship according to the new covenant. He's dependent on everything we read from Jeremiah. He's leaning into those truths as he relates to this church. Some of the things that we've seen as we've gone through this is that Paul is geographically on the other side of the Adriatic Sea in Ephesus. And he's deeply concerned about what's going on in Corinth. There are people that are undercutting his ministry. They call themselves the super apostles, came into town, and they're talking smack about Paul, and they're belittling him. They're questioning his motives. They're saying he planned, he's flippant, he's flaky, and then Paul's like concern. And then there's the church itself has been a mess. There's factions, there's fighting, there's arrogance, there's a um a contentment around sinful behavior in the church. And so Paul is deeply concerned. He's already taken a quick trip. Like if you're looking at the map this direction, he's gone from Ephesus over to Corinth real quick and back. He's written a letter that was painful to write. And now he's been expelled from Ephesus. There was a riot in Ephesus because of the ministry. He gets kicked out. He's trying to find his buddy Titus. Thinks maybe up north you'll run into him in Troas. And he's upset. And last week what we saw is Paul was really transparent, which you can do if you're operating according to the new covenant. You can afford to be somebody who's transparent because God's at work in the midst of the relationship. You can afford to be loving, you can be afforded to be truthful. We saw that God's the God of all comfort. We saw that Paul is just like, hey, I don't want you to be unaware of the things that happened to me. He wasn't trying to put up a facade, we said last week. He's not trying to play games. He's really honest and transparent. Let me read to you the text. It's just three verses we're looking at this morning, 12, 13, and 14. Paul says this Indeed, this is our boast. It's the testimony of our conscience that we have conducted ourselves in the world and especially towards you with godly sincerity and purity, not by human wisdom, but by God's grace. For we are writing nothing to you other than what you can read and also understand. I hope you will understand completely, just as you have partially understood us, that we are your reason for pride just as you also are ours in the day of the Lord Jesus. Let's pray together for a moment. Father, we ask that you would take just these three verses and that you would weave them into our hearts. Teach us the things that we individually need to hear. We could probably read this and like preach it to our spouse or our kids or our neighbor, but we need to hear it for us. And so we open up our hearts to just the voice of the Holy Spirit that you would speak into our lives. You're there. If we have a relationship with us, you're living in us, and we want to have a tender heart to hear what you have to say. And we want to have a disposition, God, before you this morning, like a runner ready to jump out of the gates. But God, we're ready to run into obedience. We're ready to go for it with what you say to us this morning. And so we entrust this time to you. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. I'm going to break it down in three ways this morning. We want to look at how Paul conducted himself, how Paul communicated, and what Paul anticipated. Let's look at this first section. How Paul conducted himself. How Paul conducted himself. And this is in verse 12. He says, indeed, this is our boast. Now, you'll remember from last week, or two weeks ago, rather, he has listed out all the junk in his just going on in his life. He's following Jesus, and yet there is turmoil going on in his life. Even, he said, he said it's even to the point of death, like despairing of death. And he was incredibly transparent with what was going on. He told the church, I don't want you to be ignorant of these things. But he has something that is making him bold here. He talks about this is our boast. Now, you're looking at that word and you're like, wait a second, I thought boasting was bad. Like, what's he talking about? Like, what's now, and this is important for 2 Corinthians because he's actually going to use this word a lot. And what we see is that there is a good boasting and a bad boasting. And one of the boastings in Paul's life, he's going to describe here, and this is my experience this morning. This morning, normally I have Hudson available. My son is able to help me set up, right? And Joeya's here. Both of them are out of town. So I called up Marvin and Tracy and Eric and Malik and Keith. And I was like, I need help. And man, to show up at the Compassion Center this morning and have those guys there even before 8 a.m. Like, let's get this truck loaded up. Let's get that room set up so we can do our discipleship classes. That was my boast. I was like, I am so proud that these guys are my friends. Yeah. It was not, it was not an airing. I wasn't like saying, God, look how good I am. I'm just proud of these guys. They were willing to help me out. And Paul says, this is my boast. And he's going to zero in on a particular behavior, his conduct. And so here's what you can know. There are some things that the Holy Spirit is going to author in your life that you can be proud of. You can rejoice as the Holy Spirit enables you and empowers you to live in a personal, in a particular way. You can be like, yeah, I'm loving that. I don't know where the work of God and my own responsibility, where one stops and one begins. But man, it's good to follow Jesus and be empowered by the Holy Spirit. And there's a sense of like, yeah, I'm boasting in that. I love what God's doing in my life. Now, there's Christians. We've talked about them before. I call them the Mr. Wilson Christian. Oh no. No, no, no. Can't take any credit. It's not me. Kind of dour, down. Paul, the way you see Paul here, he's excited about what God's doing in him. The Holy Spirit's changed him. The Holy Spirit's changing you. And that's something you can boast in. Not that you performed in a way that you get credit for, but it's like I'm excited about Jesus in my life. That's what's going to happen as we go over the next eight weeks with waypoints. You're going to be encountering God in a new way. He's going to be changing. You're going to be growing. And there's some stuff that's going to happen in your life. You're going to sense God working in your life, and it's going to be like, I'm excited about that. This is my boast that God is working in me. Amen. Amen. So Paul says, this is our boast. It's the testimony of our conscience. In other words, it's the witness, it's the believable statement that's coming from my conscience. If you're unfamiliar with the idea of conscience, God gives humans a moral self-awareness that approves or condemns of your actions or motives. If you want to study this in depth, you've got to go to Romans chapter 2. And it makes it clear that even those who do not have the law of God, they are created by God to know, to have the law written on their hearts to know what is good and bad. It is an innate sense, a judge sitting inside of you helping you know that, hey, it is wrong to murder and it is right to care for my neighbor. It is a moral self-awareness, or we could say that it is an inward faculty of moral self-awareness that passes judgment on your own thoughts or actions. Now, your conscience is not infallible. A part of being a fallen from God's design, fallen in your condition, a rebel from God, is that your conscience sometimes does not register the right information. And so you may be somebody who has a hyperactive conscience where you feel condemned about all these little things, and it makes you feel separated, like there's a distance between you and God, because maybe you listened to a song that you felt like, man, God didn't want me to do that. And your conscience is hyperactive. Or maybe you have a thing in your conscience about your diet, and you feel like, man, I shouldn't eat that food, that cheeseburger from McDonald's, that was the wrong decision. It might have been. But it your conscience is this faculty of self-awareness where not only do you feel like it's wrong, but you feel like, oh, the God's got beef with me now. That's kind of like a pun. We just talked about hamburgers. Okay. I didn't mean that. But that's how the conscience works. Okay? So it's this, so, but Paul, Paul's saying to this church, my conscience has this, is making a statement to me, and I'm able to boast in it. And this is what it is. My conscience is testifying that we have conducted ourselves in the world and especially towards you with godly sincerity and purity, not by human wisdom, but by God's grace. Now, notice a couple of things. Once again, Paul is not just saying, I feel good in my conscience about my relationship with you, but he's also narrating his, narrating the process. It's kind of like a teacher how they not just, they don't just show you, but they tell you how to get there. Right? When somebody's teaching you something like Paul is doing here, he's narrating, he's all through the section, he's narrating how he's doing his relationship with them. It's one thing for Paul to just sit there and be like, oh, I feel good about my relationship with the Corinthians. But he's actually, he's bringing them in. He's giving them a window into what's going on inside of him. He's saying, This is my, this is the this is my boast. It's the testimony of my conscience that I conducted myself. How'd you conduct yourself, Paul? What'd you do? Right? Here's what he says he did. He conducted himself towards everybody, and especially toward the Corinthian church. And he uses two words. We have it godly sincerity and purity. Godly sincerity and purity. It's a way of life, a way of life that is both single rather than being duplicitous, and it's also this purity, not mixed with falsehood. Okay, just think about people, relationships. You know people who act one way at home and another way in public. They're one way at work and another way at the party. Right? That's duplicitous, right? Two-facedness. And Paul says, the way I've worked with you, church, is that there's just one Paul, single. One single, or some versions say simple, not a bunch of pieces. My work towards you, my relationship. There's a simplicity about my relationship with you, and a purity about my relationship with you. He's also saying, look at there's nothing shady going on. I'm not playing games with you. A mark of a person who's that new covenant partner with God is that when they do relationships, they ain't playing games. They can just be simple, they can be sincere. You could hold their life up to the sun, and it's like, yeah, you know what? They they really mean what they say. That's who I want to be. That's what you want to be, because when you're like that, people can trust you, right? Once you get a sense, once you get a sense that somebody's playing games, do you really want to be close to them? Do you want to entrust things in your life to them? Do you want to do business with them? No. No. And so the the new covenant of God, it authors in Paul this way of doing life that's not shady, not playing games, not two-faced, and he says, I'm I'm able to boast in this thing, it's the testimony of that inward judge, my conscience, that I'm I'm I'm just sincere, simple, and pure. That's a good thing. And if you're hearing that, and the Holy Spirit is saying, you know what? That's something you need to work on. Remember, we talked about it. And when I was praying, I said, God, we want to run towards obedience. Maybe that's the thing. The Holy Spirit's putting on his finger on your heart. He's saying, I want to clean up your mouth. Maybe he's saying, I want to clean up your attitude. Maybe he's saying, I want to change you and what you consume on your device. The things you do privately, I want to change because I want you to have that thing. And I want your conscience when you go to church, I want you to be with Paul saying, I can boast in what God has done in my life that what you see is what you get. I'm not playing games with you. I've taken care of the private things in my life so that you're seeing the authentic, real, Jesus loving person. Amen. Amen. No games. When you and I play games in relationships, we know it. Our conscience is screaming at us. You're not being honest in this relationship. The reason why this works for Paul is because of the new covenant. Because there is this promise of God that He'll work one-on-one with other people. Why do we play games in relationships? It's because, well, what's our scripture, right? When we we look at guidance, what is it? Trust in the Lord. And lean not on your own understanding in all your ways. Acknowledge him, and he'll direct your paths. Yeah. Yeah. When we play games in our relationships, we're leaning on our own understanding, right? We're not letting him direct our paths. And so the key here is look. Look, you want to walk with God, you want to go with God and who he's designed you to be, we put down the games. And we trust that God's in the midst of our relationships, that he's at work. So when you see Paul in the text, he's one piece, no hidden agendas, nothing shady, no games, and he's proud of that because it's what God has authored in his life. Now let's go to verse 13. Verse 13, how Paul communicated, he says, For we are writing nothing to you other than what you can read and also understand. I hope you will understand completely. And the the verse is going to continue. We'll see the second part of this into verse 14. But but note it, just for one second. Do you see what he's doing? He again is narrating his behavior. So he could just write the letter, but not only could he write the letter, he's actually telling them, Do you see me? I'm writing the letter. And the way he's saying, here's how I'm writing the letter. This is important. Sometimes in your relationships with other people, you need to narrate what you're thinking. This is something I should grow in. I've been told this for the last 25 years of my life. To narrate. And the feedback that I've gotten in relationships is Josh, tell us what are you thinking? You're sitting there really quiet. Just let us know what you're thinking, you know? Not just action, but like let give us a window into your into your thoughts. And so Paul here is narrating, saying, when we write, we're writing nothing other than what you can read and also understand. Now, you'll notice too that this statement here is a substantiation for the previous statement. So he's backing up his boast from his conscience by saying, My letter writing is one of the ways I conduct myself, and my letter writing is just plain. I'm not writing in an ambiguous way. Now, it's a shame, but there are people who are out there who communicate with ambiguity, confusion to try to play games. Right? They will, instead of being straightforward and direct, they'll use a lot of fancy words. Or they will intentionally kind of hedge or be generic. Those are all games we don't play as followers of Jesus. It's safe as a follower of Jesus under the new covenant to just be direct. Now we want to speak the truth with love, right? Speak not just truth, but loving truth. But we don't play games when we write letters or text messages or emails, right? Paul says, I'm writing to you nothing other than what you can read and understand. This is this flows from the character of God. God is not shady playing games with you, he gave you an entire Bible. He wants to make his ways known to you. He's given you the whole framework of here's how I've worked with Israel for 2,000 years, right? Here's how I worked with the patriarchs. Here's my son Jesus, who is the word of God made flesh. God is not about ambiguity or lack of clarity. He's really about trying to bring you home to understanding. We just have to participate in it. But as followers of Jesus, as we're working one-on-one, we need to work hard to make sense and be clear. Some of you did not grow up around role models to help you speak articulately and clearly. You're not condemned. You're loved by God. But it doesn't hurt to work on your communication skills because your ability to communicate goes to that middle piece that you're made in the image of God. As a communicator in relationship, communication is vital and important, and God wants to help you in simple things like communication. So Paul is continuing this idea of not trying to have things in the dark, but have things being able to be understood. Let's look at the last uh sentence that begins here. He says, Um, I hope you will understand completely. That's speaking to the future. In fact, um he continues into verse 14, just as you have partially understood us. There is this desire on Paul's part, this hoping. I want you to fully get it. He's he understands that the spiritual growth, the the solving the problems in Corinth hinge upon their understanding of what he's teaching. And so he's hoping that they will understand completely. And it's parallels, it's just as you have partially understood us. And here's what Paul anticipates. Well, here's what Paul anticipates. If we go to verse 14, if we go to verse 14, I hope you will understand completely. Again, I hope you'll understand completely, just have you partially understood us, that we are your reason for pride. Similar idea to boast. Here he's saying, I want this relationship to work out with communication, and I want you to understand that we are your reason for pride, just as you are also ours. But the question is, when? When are we proud of each other? Paul has something in mind in the future, and it's called the day of the Lord. This phrase is all throughout the Old and the New Testament. But it is a it is a reference to a future day when God wraps things up with the current agenda, right? Right now we're living between Jesus' first coming and his second coming. But when Jesus returns and establishes his kingdom on earth and he rules and reigns from Jerusalem, there's a new heavens and new earth. When that day comes, that's the day of the Lord. And Paul says to this church, what I want is for you to be proud of me, and I want you to know I'm gonna be proud of you. And so right now we're working on relationship, and it's strained, and there's some junk that's gone on in our relationship, but listen, we're working through it according to the new covenant because someday the day of the Lord is coming. And I want us to be proud of one another. Interesting, right? Because we always think of like, man, I can't wait to meet Jesus, you know, in the air, or I can't wait to be at his throne worshiping him. Like, we can't wait for those things, but it looks like according to Paul, there's an aspect where we're proud of one another in the day of the Lord. Isn't that fascinating? We don't, there's a lot that we don't know about the day of the Lord, when it's gonna happen, what it's all gonna look like, how it's all gonna work out. But this is one of those things that's fascinating that Paul is like, let's get this worked out. Because we got a future. We got a future together. We want to be proud of one another. There is a, we don't love one another because of what we're getting out of it. We're woven into a grand story. We are woven into a grand story that God has written, that Jesus is fulfilling, and as we love one another, there is this future hope of all that we will experience because of our obedience to the new covenant. Isn't that awesome? There's good things, saints. There's good things. And I just, what I want for us as a church is we're like we're sitting under Paul, we're listening to him. He's narrating his relationship, and what I want for you desperately is I want you to hear how God's at work in Paul. I want you to, because you're in relationships too, and I want for you to do those relationships by the power of the Holy Spirit, framed up by the new covenant, not legalistic, not uh, you know, without with you know, loose and a mess. I want you to walk according to the power of the Holy Spirit in the new covenant. Lord, we um we're grateful for your word and Paul's example, the dynamic that's there that we're reading about. And Lord, we we want to be a people that just do relationships empowered by you. And so thank you for the gift of your Holy Spirit this week. We again offer ourselves to you collectively. We say, Lord, we're ready to go for it. We're ready to obey. Thank you for another week. Thank you for another opportunity to obey you. Thank you that you're gonna forgive our sins when we mess up. Thank you for giving us a way of escape before we even are tempted. Lord, we know it's gonna be there. Lord, we're excited for this new week. Pray you go before us in Jesus' name. Amen.