Straight to the Heart

To celebrate the launch this week of “Straight to the Heart of Genesis” and “Straight to the Heart of 1&2 Corinthians”, I’m posting one final chapter here for you from 2 Corinthians. If you want more chapters after this, you’re going to have to buy the book! Back to the blog as usual from next week!

We all know what it is like to suffer. We have all cried out to God at some point in pain. Since he is all-powerful, why does he let us suffer? That’s the question which God answers in 2 Corinthians 1, when he talks to us about VICTORY WOUNDS.

“For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.” (2 Corinthians 1:5) 

On the morning of 12^th July 1794, disaster struck a 35-year-old English sailor as he commanded a battery of cannon at the siege of a Corsican city named Calvi. A French cannonball hit the wall behind which he was crouching and sent debris flying into his right eye. One-eyed and battle-scarred, he felt as though his life had ended. Semi-blindness was hardly an advantage for a naval officer.

 Seven years later, that same sailor was leading a group of ships at the Battle of Copenhagen. When his overcautious admiral raised the signal for him to withdraw, he found himself in a terrible dilemma. From his position in the thick of the fighting, he could see that he needed just a few more minutes to win an outright victory, yet if he disobeyed a direct order in battle he would quite rightly be court-martialled. Suddenly, he had an idea. “I only have one eye. I have the right to be blind sometimes,” he told his officers as he raised the telescope to his useless eye to see the signal. “I see no such signal, press on with the attack!” That sailor, Lord Horatio Nelson, went on to destroy the Danish fleet that day and become a national hero. Yesterday’s tragedy at Calvi had in fact been the gateway to victory at Copenhagen.

 Paul did not know about Lord Nelson, but he knew about this principle. It was one of the things which kept him cheerful in Macedonia despite his terrible year. In Acts 19, Luke tells us about the riot which forced him to flee from Ephesus in the summer of 55AD. A group of metalworkers led an anti-Christian riot, and soon gathered thousands of angry protestors. Unable to find Paul, they seized two of his team members named Gaius and Aristarchus, dragged them to the city’s 25,000-seater theatre, and threatened them for over two hours. Such was Paul’s evangelistic zeal that when he heard about the crowd his friends were forced to plead with him not to go there and preach the Gospel, but deep down he was very scared. “We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life,” he tells the Corinthians. “Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death.” He truly believed he was about to be martyred, yet he looks back on the incident as a victory wound.

 He believed it had become for him a gateway to greater faith. His evaluation was that “This happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.” Nothing could have grown his faith like that moment when he knew that it was ‘trust in God or die’. By the time he and Timothy had reached the relative safety of Philippi, it had permanently shaped their perspective and trained them to handle whatever else lay ahead: “He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us.”

 Paul did not know it yet, but this lesson was to prove crucial. Acts 21 tells us the sequel to the story. Paul arrives at the port of Caesarea, only one stop away from Jerusalem and the end of his Third Missionary Journey. He is planning and praying about a Fourth Journey westward to plant churches Italy, Spain and Southern Gaul. Suddenly, the prophet Agabus warns him that if he ventures to Jerusalem he will be taken prisoner by the Romans. His friends weigh the prophecy and urge him not to go. Paul instinctively replies with the faith which he learned through his ‘Calvi’ at Ephesus: “Why are you weeping and breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.”

Because Paul had faith to go to Jerusalem and be arrested, he was given opportunity to preach to almost every nobleman in Palestine and to Caesar’s own household and Praetorian Guard in Rome. He could not have reached such an audience through his own initiative, but simply through the faith which he learned the hard way at Ephesus. As Smith Wigglesworth used to teach: “Great faith is a product of great fights. Great testimonies are the outcome of great tests. Great triumphs can only come after great trials.”

Paul also believed that trouble was a gateway to fruitfulness. It forced him to rely even more than ever upon “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort.” Hudson Taylor, the nineteenth-century missionary to China, found the same thing to be true when a mob set fire to his house during the night. He, his wife and their children almost lost their lives, but he protested that “It doesn’t matter how great the pressure is. What really matters is where the pressure lies – whether it comes between you and God or whether it presses you nearer his heart.” Paul had let it press him nearer to God’s heart, and he had found in the process that God’s own heart began to express itself through him. The Lord “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God,” he explained, and he demonstrates this virtuous circle at work in 7:6-7. Because God comforted Paul, he was able to comfort the Corinthians, which meant the Corinthians could comfort Titus, Titus could comfort Paul, and Paul in turn could comfort the Corinthians in this letter! 

As a result, Paul and Timothy rejoiced in their troubles as the gateway to victory. They could pray for and speak into situation at Corinth because they knew that God would help them lead the church through to a successful resolution. “Our hope for you is firm,” they write in verse 7, “because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.” How did Paul keep on trusting, keep on comforting and keep on investing his life in his disappointing rabble of converts at Corinth? Because God had taken the ‘Calvi’ of Ephesus and had turned it into a victory wound for Corinth. 

Perhaps you are experiencing suffering, pain, disappointment or relationship breakdown in your own life. Perhaps, like Paul, you are under pressure far beyond your own ability to endure. God wants you to rejoice in such troubles as your ‘Calvi’ and to let him transform them into tomorrow’s ‘Copenhagen’.

The great English preacher Charles Spurgeon warns that this is always the pathway along which God’s leads his People as his gateway to faith, fruitfulness and victory: 

“Reckon, then, that to acquire soul-winning power you will have to go through fire and water, through doubt and despair, through mental torment and soul distress … You must go into the fire if you are to pull others out of it, and you will have to dive into the floods if you are to draw others out of the water … In our beginnings we are too fine to be fit, or too great to be good … A blacklead pencil is of no use at all till it is cut; the fine cedar wood must be cut away; and then the inward metal which marks and writes will have fair play.”