2 Corinthians 3:5

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY

‘Our sufficieney is of God.’

2 Corinthians 3:5

The subjects of this chapter are, first, the reality, and secondly, the objects and the dignity of the Christian ministry. I say Christian ministry rather than Christian priesthood, because it is not merely the particular office of the priest as distinguished from those of deacon or of bishop which is being brought before us, but rather that whole system of human agency, including all orders and degrees of service, by which God has chosen to carry out the designs of the Incarnation and the extension of His Church.

I. The reality of the Christian ministry.—Remember there is such a system of human agency ordained by God as that which we understand by the Christian ministry. The New Testament, or the New Covenant, or the Christian Church, call it which you please, is just as much an institution of God’s as the Jewish system had been, and its ministry is God’s appointment too.

II. Its objects and dignity.—These two qualities we must take together, just as St. Paul has taken them. For the dignity of the Christian ministry does not lie in the privileges of its ministers, but in their usefulness to the brethren. It is in the use that they are of, or rather in the use that God has seen fit to make of them, the uses God puts them to, that the dignity of the Christian ministry lies. And so we say that the objects of the Christian ministry are its dignity, and that we cannot take them separately, as if they were different and separate things. In the verses before us, then, St. Paul defines the objects of the Christian ministry in two distinct phrases. He calls it

(a) The ministration of the Spirit; and

(b) The ministration of righteousness.

In these phrases he teaches us that the Christian ministry exists to ‘administer the Spirit,’ and so to administer righteousness. These he states to be the objects for which the ministry of the Christian Church was instituted, and from these statements he draws the inference of the dignity of the ministry which subserves objects so important.

Illustration

‘The ministry of the Church is a ministry of righteousness, because it leads to righteousness, by bringing men under the dominating and permeating influence of that Holy Spirit Who is shed abroad in our hearts to make us righteous. It teaches righteousness; it teaches our need of righteousness; it teaches the means of righteousness; its very function and duty is so to interweave itself and its offices, and its services, and its teachings, with a man’s whole life as to keep him in the way of righteousness at every turn of his life. Its very function is to take every precaution that all Christian people shall be always acting under the influence of the Holy Spirit, so that their whole life may be not their life, but the life of the Spirit living in them and animating their life. This is the secret; this, so to speak, is the rationale of all that system of Church services by which most especially the Church’s ministry exercises its ministration.’