"We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away,
yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day." (2 Corinthians 4:16)
Paul starts the chapter with 4:1 saying, "Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart." There are several “do not lose heart” passages in the New Testament: Luke 18:1; 2 Corinthians 4:1,16; Galatians 6:9; Ephesians 3:13; Hebrews 12:3; 2 and Thessalonians 3:13.
It is a good thing to remember the saints and heroes of faith who did not lose heart while living in this world and who finished their journeys in this world and now at the eternal rest as we see in the Book of Hebrews. The Bible calls them "cloud of witnesses" that surround us. (Hebrews 12:1).
There are those who say that the 'cloud of witnesses' alludes to the
famous Roman games and Greek games, a big amphitheater, and down on the track
below are the participants running the race. Up above them, and surrounding
them in the great amphitheater or stadium, are rows upon rows of spectators
watching them as they run. The cloud of witnesses refers to all human souls
living here on earth and in eternity. The cloud is those who have finished
their race and being at rest with the Lord and the ones here living on earth
with the Lord.
One of the great questions which all of us has to face --
and all of us do face it even though it may be in the privacy of our own
thoughts -- is, "What is waiting for me when I die?" There is a new
interest in that subject today. Many books are coming out, explorations are
being made, even scientific studies attempted in this field, though it is very
difficult to see how science can probe in this area at all. As you examine the
answers that are being given, there are really three categories of them, and
only three.
First, there are those who say that when you die nothing at all happens. You simply pass out of existence. Like a candle going out, your life gutters out into darkness; there is nothing left, no experience, no feeling, no reaction, no knowledge. Men, like animals, perish; they simply cease to exist, and that is the end of it. Almost all who endorse an atheistic philosophy of life attempt to hold that view. The only trouble with it, of course, is its absolute despair. There is no hope for meaningful development or experience. Human personality with all its possibilities and wonders is ended, and there is no hope at the end. The result, of course, of a life with no hope is the spreading of existential despair throughout our present existence. We see this widely on every hand. This view of life has never been described in more eloquent terms, perhaps, than these words from the philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell: “One by one as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Brief and powerless is man's life. On him and all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark.” Those words reflect the despair that always grips the heart when anyone with that point of view contemplates the end of his earthly existence. Everything is "now," and people are urged to live for the present because there is no other life to come.
The second category of answers, one which virtually says that when you come to the end of your life an uncertainty that anything can happen. The answers are so contradictory that it is clear that nobody knows what he is talking about. Some of these answers come from the evidence of people who claim to have died and then returned to life again. That category of answer, therefore, always means there is no security — no certainty — about the life to come. There may be such a life, but no one really knows.
The third category is the Christian answer, the answer of the Word of God, based upon the teaching of the only man who, as far as history records, has ever clearly, openly, and definitely returned from death. Jesus not only conquered death himself but also he has given us a great word of security and surety to rest upon about our life after death. He sent his apostles to tell the good news that in Jesus Christ there is a certain future of glory and peace awaiting, but for those without him, a future of endless frustration, of pain and regret.
Apostle Paul lifts his eyes from the experience he is going through at the moment to the hope that
lies beyond. He introduces it with that very characteristic word we have seen
all through this letter, this great cry of encouragement and hope in Verse 16:
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner
nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is
preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we
look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the
things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
(2 Corinthians 4:16-18 RSV)
There is a reason for hope, not only coming from our present
experience of the grace of God (as Paul has been describing it), but also as we
look to the future, we do not lose hope.
Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. (2 Corinthians 4:16 RSV)
That gives him hope. It is true, he says, that the outward man is perishing. Now we need to clearly understand that there is a difference between the "outward" man and the "inward man". The "outward" man that Paul speaks of here is the body and the mind, which he says are slowly falling apart. We can all give testimony to that. I have noticed that print in the books gets smaller and smaller all the time. And I cannot tell what is going on around me unless somebody reads aloud to me. I have noticed too that people are younger than they used to be when I was their age, and people my own age are considerably older than I am. I ran into one of my school classmates. We did not recognize each other.
We simply have to face the fact that the outward man is deteriorating, growing weak and feeble, and subject to much groaning and agony. "Well, that is what is happening to me too," Paul says, "but I don't get discouraged, because the inner man is being renewed day by day." The "inner" man, of course, is the "real" me. It is the human spirit inside that has its conscious expression in the soul, that unique character, that combination of soul and spirit that marks mankind as different from the animals. Paul says that his experience is that that is daily being renewed. The word he uses is, "made new," "made over afresh." He is speaking of that kind of inner power of the spirit that keeps him triumphant, rejoicing, optimistic, faithful, trusting, expectant, as he lives day by day, even though the outward things, his body and his mind, are gradually falling apart. That is the hope of the believer. Paul says the very fact of that is testimony to us that we are being inwardly prepared for something great to come.
Do not lose heart means do not be discouraged.
One of the biggest problems people have is discouragement. We get frustrated and disappointed when afflictions come one after another. Paul had experienced this. In Chapter 11 starting vers 16 of this very letter 2 Corinthians he goes through a long list of his afflictions and there is nothing like it in the annals of literature. He speaks of being beaten five times, of being beaten with a rod three times, of being thrown into jail many times, of enduring hunger, thirsting and fasting, of hardship, shipwreck, dangers and perils on every side. All this was part of his experience, yet he sums it all up in that wonderful way, "this slight momentary affliction." In Romans 8:18 (RSV)he puts it, "the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us." Here again, this is that incomparable eternal weight of glory which is yet to come. It is something that is beyond description. C. S. Lewis has a great message by the name “The Weight of Glory” as we wait in this frail bodies: “The door on which we have all been knocking all our lives will open at last.” Our present sufferings are preparing us for something so incomparable, so amazing, so marvelous that there are no words to describe it. That means that no trial, no pain, no isolation, no heartache, no loneliness, no weakness or failure. Our sufferings in this world are building for us an incomparable weight of glory. The Bible encourages us saying, “Let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart” (Galatians 6:9).
I saw an interview with a trapeze artist. After watching them “fly through the air with the greatest of ease,” a man asked one of the flyers the secret of the handoff in mid-air. He said the secret is not to have fear of falling because you know that the catcher is there to catch you. He expalined, “The secret is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, my catcher, I simply stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me and pull me safely over the apron. The worst thing the flyer can do is to try to catch the catcher! If I grabbed Joe’s wrist, I might break them, or he might break mine, and that would be the end of both of us. A flier must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flier must trust, with outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him.”
Do not lose heart means do not lose hope.
“We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:18 RSV). Just like he compared the outward man and inward man, Paul is talking about a seen world and an unseen world. Behind the visible, material things that we see and measure and taste and touch and feel, are invisible forces which no one can see or taste or touch or feel.
It has always been difficult for men to believe that there are unseen realities, invisible to human eye. But living in the world of cloud technology has confirmed my faith in unseen things. Behind this visible computer here with its material appearance of plastic and metal, science says the reality is that the motion by infinitesimal particles traveling at such tremendous speed they give the impression of being solid. Now we have the term “the virtual world” The universe is made mostly of space. Our minds grasp that, but our emotions struggle with it -- because it seems to be contrary to our experience. How can we store information in space and access it as needed. That is what science itself tells us. We trust our experiences and believe on those unseen things. The things we see are passing, changing; they are ephemeral. All the events that happen in our life today will tomorrow be as out-of-date as yesterday's newspaper, all of them changed. They are like a movie; they are shadowy reflections of real things. What are the real things?
Paul calls them, "the things that are unseen," the invisible forces at work, of which the world, by the way, is almost totally unaware. The Bible tells us what they are: There is the Word of God, that most unchangeable of all things. God spoke and it was, and that Word can never be altered. "Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away" (Matthew 24:35, Mark 13:31, Luke 21:33 KJV), Jesus said. God our Creator is unchangeable but invisible. He is the supporter of all things. Our eyes, therefore, must look beyond the visible to the invisible things. God's word never changes. It is the one reliable thing in all the unreliable universe. We understand by the Word of God that all things are held together by him. David wrote, “I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13). If you believe that God is faithful, that He is good and that He is for you, you won’t easily lose heart.
While he and six hundred of his fighting men were away, their enemies, the Amalekites, stole all their possessions, destroyed their homes and took their women and children captive. David and his men returned to find nothing but a smoking pile of rubble. Everything and everyone was gone. 1 Samuel 30:4 tells us, “David and the people who were with him lifted up their voices and wept, until they had no more power to weep.” They were utterly devastated – and who wouldn’t be? David had no choice in what had happened, but he recognized that he did have a choice in how he was going to respond. He could stand there and see nothing but the disaster and his pain or he could look beyond the rubble and see God. He could have completely lost heart, but instead, 1 Samuel 30:6 tells us, “David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.”
Do not lose heart because God is preparing a place.
Paul says in in chapter 5, "We know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling, so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we sigh with anxiety; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. (2 Corinthians 5:1-4 RSV).
The reality is that our bodies are mortal. The word 'man' comes from 'mortis' which means death. It is the root of the word mortuary. Paul begins with an acknowledgment of our physical nature. Paul states, "Though outwardly we are wasting away." This is a reminder that our earthly bodies are subject to the effects of aging, illness, and the hardships of life. We all experience physical limitations and vulnerabilities. However, this acknowledgment is not meant to discourage us but to remind us of the temporal nature of this world and the importance of focusing on what truly matters.
In Christ, you and I have two aspects to our being. And there's a sense in which these two aspects are going in two different directions. There's the outward man which is our body. It's the part of each other's being that we can all see. And then, there's the inward man, which has been made new in Christ. The outward man is constantly going in the direction of decay and destruction. There's no way to stop that; because it was only given to us by God to be a temporary dwelling place; a body that is going to one day die—even though it will later be resurrected from the grave in a glorious state that will last forever. The inward man, however, is going in a different direction. It is the part of your being that has already been made eternal.
Dear friends, as Paul says, “We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (v. 16). The apostle Paul knew how easy it is to “lose heart.” He describes his life as one of danger, pain, and deprivation (2 Corinthians 11:23–29). Yet he viewed those “troubles” as temporary. And he encouraged us to think not only about what we see but also about what we can’t see—that which is eternal (4:17–18). Despite what’s happening to us, our loving Father is continuing our inner renewal every day. His presence with us is sure. Through the gift of prayer, He’s only a breath away. And His promises to strengthen us and give us hope and joy remain true.
In 2 Corinthians 4:16, we find a profound message of hope and renewal. Though our outward circumstances may change, and our bodies may weaken, we have the assurance of inward renewal through our faith in Christ.
Let us not lose heart, but instead, draw strength from God's daily renewal process and press on in our journey of faith. May we be encouraged to face each day with renewed hope and unwavering trust in the One who sustains us.
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