2 Corinthians 4:5-6

YOUR SERVANTS FOR JESUS’ SAKE

‘We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.’

2 Corinthians 4:5

Such is this great clergyman’s central and ultimate conception of the Christian ministry. He has much to say about it, elsewhere, from other sides; about its commission and authority, and about the moral dignity of its idea. But here he lays his hand upon its very heart, and gives us the central glory of the thing.

I. The words denote the most absolute antithesis possible to every thought of an ecclesiastical assumption, to all such self-exaltation of a ministerial class or order as can harden it into that far different thing, for which the Christianity of the Apostles has no place, a hierarchical caste. The words delightfully negative all that is connoted by that term of mournful omen, as of mournful history, clericalism. They present to us, in short, a conception not magisterial, but altogether ministerial.

II. He lives to make Christ Jesus great to human hearts.—He lives ‘that Christ may be magnified in his body,’ that Christ may look out at the windows of his life, and may beckon from its doors, that his word alike and his example may persuade men, with an indefinable but strong attraction, to ‘taste and see how gracious the Lord is,’ and never so gracious as when He is most absolutely Lord. To this man all interests are subordinated to these; he rises up with this aim in the morning, and he lies down with it at night. His life is manifold in its contents; he is a man, ‘a man in Christ,’ and therefore all the more a man; nothing that is essentially human is alien to his sympathies.

III. He begins to know for himself that ‘to be ministered unto’ is infinitely less like the regal greatness of the King of Saints than ‘to minister,’ to ‘love and serve.’ He begins to see what he will experience perfectly in the life of glory, that our finite being can never expand and sun itself fully into the fair ideal of power and beauty for which it was created, and for which now it is redeemed, till it goes out and upward from the bondage of self-seeking into the large and holy freedom of a self-sacrificing love for God, and for man in Him. Therefore he is bent upon the enterprise of ‘making Jesus King’ in the souls of others too. He knows that it is the absolute right of his Redeemer that He should reign in them wholly and for ever.

To that end the minister is their bond-servant. He exists for them, he belongs to them, he is at command for them, that they may yield themselves to Jesus Christ, for this world and the world to come, and so may live indeed.

—Bishop H. C. G. Moule.

Illustration

‘To the Corinthians, whom he loved, and who loved him well, yet perplexed and grieved him too, he presents his whole self, without even the thinnest artificial veil. Affection, hope, disappointment, indignation, irony, bitter rebuke, tenderest entreaty—all comes out precisely as it is felt, in the utterance of a devotion to them which has nothing to conceal. To be sure, all is dominated by a purpose. The Second Epistle to the Corinthians is no fitful rhapsody of troubled feeling. All bears upon the rescue of the disciples back from misbeliefs to the eternal truth, from confusion to a strong cohesion in the Lord, from themselves to Christ, to holiness, to heaven. But into the line of that great purpose the Apostle pours not his reasonings only, nor even his entreaties, but himself. He spends upon his converts his own innermost being. He gives to them his soul.’