Hello
@Pureness …. Paul’s advice to the church at Corinth was very good, wasn’t it? It’s also good for us. If you read the letters to the Corinthians in their entirety, you’ll see that they had many of the same problems that the church does today. They often lost their focus on Christ and instead divided their loyalty among other leaders. They allowed immorality among the members without discipline; they argued and sued one another in court; they quibbled over dietary concerns and were treating the Lord’s Supper as if it were just any old regular meal, and they didn’t even use good manners and wait for each other to eat. Worse, they had allowed false teachers to convince some of them that Paul had no authority as an apostle and that his teaching about bodily resurrection was wrong.
Paul had taught them the pure message of the gospel and they had believed; yet they had allowed doubt and corruption to test the faith they once had. By the time Paul gave the advice in 2 Corinthians 13:5, he was planning on having to come to them with the same message again for the
third time!
You see, without faith in Christ, the message of the gospel will never take root in the heart of the hearer. As long as this age lasts, we will always have false teachers among us, we will always have difficult circumstances to overcome, and we will always suffer from the consequences of sin, whether our own or the sins of others. We all need to examine and test ourselves to see if we are “in the faith” and that our hope is truly in Christ and what He did for us. If we are “in the faith,” problems we encounter in life will not shake us as they did in the Corinthian church. We will know exactly where we stand… on the Rock of our salvation and His promise of grace to cover all our sin.
Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you are disqualified.
- 2 Corinthians 13:5 (NKJV)