Each week these Sermon Prep posts are written to help us prepare us to see Christ together in a way that transforms us more and more into His image.

“We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18).”

For the next two Sundays, 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 will focus our gaze at the extraordinary joyful generosity of Jesus that has the power to make us extraordinarily, joyfully, and even sacrificially, generous.

“You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9).”

But just knowing about the joyfully generous grace of Jesus, doesn’t automatically make us joyfully generous. Transformation into this aspect of His image “comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

This Sunday we’ll see Paul hold up some extremely poor churches in Macedonia as examples of those whose giving looked like Jesus. He calls their acts of giving “the gift of grace given” among them (8:1). Now while their gift to relieve their poor brothers and sisters in Jerusalem certainly was a gift of grace given by them, Paul seems to be saying their generosity didn’t originate within them, but was “a divinely bestowed gift and spiritual disposition” given to them by God (2 Corinthians, Moyer Hubbard). It was a spiritual disposition that Paul longed to see the Corinthian church (and Grace La Mirada) “excel in” (i.e. grow in, 8:7) as well. That’s why he wrote these two chapters.

This Sunday Kenny Clark will be preaching 2 Corinthians 8:1-15 and Caleb Bilti will be leading our sung worship. Would you pray for each as they prepare? And as we pray for our church family, let’s use 2 Corinthians 8:7 as a prompt, asking the Lord that, “as we excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in all earnestness… that by His Spirit, we would excel in this act of grace also.”

See you Sunday, Grace. Come hungry!

 

Song Link of the Week

How Rich a Treasure We Possess

How rich a treasure we possess
In Jesus Christ, our Lord
His blood, our ransom and defense
His glory, our reward
The sum of all created things
Is worthless in compare
For our inheritance is Him
Whose praise angels declare