Kennystix's podcast
The Aroma of Christ Among the Nations
The following resource is from desiringgod.org. The scripture text for this evening comes from 2 Corinthians 2 verses 12 through 17. If you're reading from a Pew Bible, it can be found on page 965. 2 Corinthians 2 verses 12 through 17. When I came to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ, even though a door was opened for me and the Lord, my spirit was not at rest because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I took leave of them and went on to Macedonia. But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God, among those who are being saved, and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not like so many peddlers of God's word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God in the sight of God, we speak in Christ. Father, would you come and be fragrant in this service with the knowledge of your Son? And don't let the aroma for anyone here be death. Let the aroma be life. May Son awaken to the truth and reality of Jesus Christ and be saved. And may others find this aroma so compelling that they want to wear it as a garment in a place where there is no aroma of Jesus at all. Help me handle this text faithfully, I pray in Jesus' name, Amen. Before we turn to the text in 2 Corinthians, let me put it in a missionary context. Paul was a missionary. We saw that crystal clear in Romans 15. Remember the sermon on the Holy Ambition? You know what the Holy Ambition of Paul was? To preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else's foundation. That's the way a missionary talks. A missionary is a kind of person who's got his impulse inside, wanting to move beyond where there's concentrations and saturations of the gospel towards places and peoples where there is little available of the gospel. That's what a missionary is. We call them frontier missions or pioneer missions or missions to unreach peoples. Paul was the first and Paul was probably the greatest. But what a lineage of lovers have followed from this great man in his train. Right down to this day, this service and this moment, whether you're north downtown or where I'll be tomorrow morning south. Now you can state the reason for why this lineage has lasted for 2,000 years and is still so compelling and relevant today that all those people would give themselves that way, several ways. One, you can remind yourself that Jesus said just before He left, to go back to heaven, all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to me, therefore go make disciples. I'll be with you to the end of the age. Or you could remind yourself of Psalm 66. Sing a new song to the Lord, sing to the Lord all the earth, sing to the Lord and bless His name, declare His salvation among the nations, declare His glory in all the earth and be reminded, He means for that to get done. Or you could go to one of the most familiar passages in the Bible and say, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him might not perish but have everlasting life." And remember that He means for His salvation to be proclaimed to the nations so that anyone who believes will be saved and those who don't will perish. Or you could go online to JoshuaProject.net, which I do recommend that you do. I don't know of any sight, more helpful, clearer for getting unreached peoples before you than JoshuaProject.net, where you will learn things like this, which I did just yesterday to refresh the details. According to their rigorous way of doing statistics, 15,988 distinct ethnolinguistic peoples exist in the world. Of these, 6,572 are unreached. If you define unreached as having fewer than 2% Christians, 2.6 billion people live in those unreached people groups. Just to give you a flavor of the 100 largest unreached people groups, 44 of them are in India, 8 are in China, 7 are in Indonesia and Pakistan respectively. The 3 largest are the Japanese in Japan, the Bengali in Bangladesh and the Shaik in India. Of the 100 largest unreached people groups, 43 are Muslim, 36 are Hindu, 9 are Buddhist, 22 of those peoples have populations over 20 million people. In other words, that's one way of answering the question why this lineage of lovers keeps ongoing. We have a great work in front of us and a great Lord who says, "I'm going to get it done. This gospel will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations and then the end will come and he has all authority to do it." One of the great longings of my life is that we at Bethlehem would be a sending base, a sending base, a launching pad for an ever-increasing number of missionaries to unreached peoples, and that we would send them with ever-increasing effectiveness and ever-increasing biblical faithfulness and ever-increasing care for them and their families. And I think about not wasting my life at age 60, I don't want to waste it. As often as anything this comes to my mind, so pray, so study, so preach, so write, so lead as to raise up more and more people, young people, restless mid-lifers, wise, mature, retired people who know they shouldn't spend the last 20 years playing and are looking for a way not to waste it. Few things feel more significant, more strategic, more non-wasting than for me to invest my life in whatever it takes this church and everywhere I can to stimulate and fan and breathe upon that passion to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to break like a tidal wave over the unreached peoples of the world. That's going to happen. God will get this done, and then the Lord will stand forth from heaven, and what a supper we will eat. Turn with me to 2 Corinthians, chapter 2, if you don't have your Bibles open still. Second Corinthians, and as we go, I want to pray that God would come and do this because I'm really aware that as much as anything, God uses texts, inspired texts from the Bible, preached in the power of the Holy Spirit to call people from where they are to another place. If you think back over your life, at least my life, it has been so often in worship services where the lights have gone on. All the fog has been blown away, and I suddenly realize this is where I'm supposed to be. That's where I'm supposed to go. Here's where I'm supposed to study. May it happen. Let's pray. Father, as we open this text now, I plead with you that it would live that the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ would be so compelling that no one would smell it as the smell of death, but only life. Your life, and through us, the aroma in the world among the nations. So come and help me, I pray in Jesus' name, amen. Here's a situation behind this text in chapter 2, verses 12 to 17. Paul has written a painful letter to Corinth, and he's worried that it could have alienated them, and he hopes it would have healed them. And he doesn't know which was the effect, and he sent Titus to find out, go find out what's happening. It could hardly sleep over this. That's the situation. Verse 12. When I came to Troas, let me give you the geography here. This is Greece. If we got Greece, this is Corinth right down here, Athens and Corinth, this is Greece. This is Turkey today, okay? There's a little bit of water flowing through here. This is the Aegean Sea right there. This up here is Macedonia. That's Macedonia. And over here is Troas, okay? When I came to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ, even though a door was open for me in the Lord, my spirit was not at rest because I didn't find my brother Titus there. So I took leave of them and went on to Macedonia. And I'll stop there and let this sink in. An open door for the gospel is in Troas. And you got this missionary whose heart won't rest, and he's torn. What should I do? There's an open door in Troas. I can hardly stand it being here, and he doesn't stay. He crosses the isthmus and heads over in Macedonia, looking for Titus. He's on his way up from Corinth to meet Paul. He's looking for him. I've got to hear what's going on in Corinth. I cannot bear this. Now, I'd love to linger here and preach a whole sermon on this, but I'm not. I'm just going to say in passing, I wonder if that describes some of you in this service. There's a wide open door for you. Fruit could abound here, here and you cannot rest. You're torn. Should he have left Troas? Should he have left Troas? An open door for the gospel and you're restless about the Corinthians. Should he have left? I'm not going to answer. I'm just going to say he left, and because he left, we have this text. That's the way God is. Right or wrong, he left. Should you? It's not easy to know, is it? I'm sure Paul didn't know. My guess is, when you read over in chapter 11, "Fighting's without, fears within." That's the way he described himself, arriving in Macedonia. He didn't know if he'd done right. Good to be a Christian and have a cross. Now he's in Macedonia and Titus comes. He doesn't say that here, but we know that from chapter 7. Let me read chapter 7, verses 5 to 7, "Even when we came to Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted at every turn, fighting without, fear within. But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming, but also by the comfort with which he was comforted by you down in Corinth. As he told us of your longing, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced still more." Okay. Now that's the situation in Macedonia. Titus shows up. He meets. The news is good from Corinth. And when Paul undertakes to write about that in chapter 2, he writes about it in a very strange way. He chooses two word pictures that are shocking and conflicted. Let's take the pictures one at a time. This is the life of a missionary in picture form. The first picture is in the beginning of verse 14. He goes to Macedonia and he says, "But thanks be to God." Now you've got to hear, Titus has shown up, "But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession," and stop there. That probably doesn't mean what you think it does, because that word is rare and unusual and almost certainly means what a Roman general does when he captures an enemy, puts him in chains, takes him back to Rome, sets up a day when there will do this great processional, puts the enemies behind, gets on his great horse, carries the great banner of the army and rides and parades the enemy through the city on their way to be killed. That's the word. It's very unusual. It's used one other time by the Apostle Paul, which tips us off to its meaning. I'll read you Colossians 2.15. It goes like this, "God disarmed the rulers and authorities," so there he is, "in war with the devil at the cross and he strips the devil of his final weapons. God disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to an open chain." Here comes the word, "tramping over them in him, leading them in triumphal procession." That's the devil he's talking about. So in Colossians, the word is used to say, "God triumphed over the devil and leads him in triumphal procession and in 2 Corinthians 2," it says, "he triumphed over Paul and led him in triumphal procession as his captive enemy, shamed for his opposition to the king." A very strange picture to create. There is one crucial difference between the devil and Paul in this train, and it's in verse 14 in the phrase, "in Christ." But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession. In other words, Paul was defeated on the Damascus road. He was an enemy of Jesus, "Why do you persecute me? You can't beat me, I always win." He defeated Paul on the Damascus road, took him captive, and now he brings him to faith, he forgives his sin, he justifies him in his presence, and he makes him a glad and willing servant in this train, but he still uses that awful image that has him on his way to suffer and die. And Paul makes much of it in 2 Corinthians, that his very ministry is a ministry of suffering. So the picture here is that on the one hand, he's been conquered, and in Christ is willingly forgiven and justified and serving the great King, but on the other hand, he is a defeated foe, and he is called upon to look weak and shameful, like the off scouring of the world in this train. Now why did he say that here? Why does he use that image here? It's because he wants to accomplish a couple of things at one turn. On the one hand, he wants to rejoice that Titus has come. Yes, yes, victory! The Corinthians have repented, and they didn't take my painful letter against me. That was a risk. Oh, thank you. Thank you. You ever written anything like that to anybody? I have, and that's wonderful, but he knows something else too. There are so many adversaries in Corinth. They don't accept his authority. They preach another gospel, chapter 11, verse 4. He calls them super apostles. They don't recognize his authority. They don't see Christ in him, they see him as weak, powerless. Look at him. He's like one of those chained up enemies being drugged along to death. He knows that's the way they see him there, and so his word picture is meant to say, "I'm a missionary, and sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes people see Christ, and sometimes they just see a crucified criminal. Sometimes they smell life, and sometimes they smell death." So I've moved into the second picture, haven't I? Verse 14. This picture is a triumphal procession where you have this both-and-of yes, he's in Christ and a willing servant behind a great king who will triumph, but yes, he's also a slave. He's often seen as shamed and weak and powerless and can't triumph over all the foes in Corinth, and he knows that, and that's what it means to be a missionary. Now the second picture, a sacrificial offering as a sweet fragrance to God. Verse 14, "And through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. The missionary life is a life of spreading fragrance of the knowledge of Christ." And the reason I say this is a picture of a sacrificial offering to God, so God smells it first before anybody else does, is because it says that in verse 15. First phrase, "For we are the aroma of Christ to God." You see that? "This aroma is first smelled by God. We are the aroma of Christ to God." Now what does that mean? Before anybody else is smelling this, God is smelling this, what is this? The explanation I think goes like this, in Ephesians chapter 5 verse 2, Paul described Christ's death like this, "Christ loved us and gave himself for us a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God." So in Paul's mind, when Christ suffered and died for him, Christ was an aroma, like an incense, and God was leaning over as he poured out his wrath on his own son. He was leaning over and saying, "That's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, or ever will see," and it smells magnificent to me. That's the picture of the death of Christ before the Father. Now Paul sees himself captured by this Christ and commissioned to extend that love and that suffering to the world. So that he now, bearing in his body the stripes of Jesus, sharing the very sufferings of Christ becomes the same aroma to God. God leans over, Paul's sufferings when he's in prison and when he's being beaten with rods and stripes, when he's being driven out of the synagogue, when he's shipwrecked in the sea, God leans over and says, "What, a beautiful aroma." That's why I get teary-eyed looking at those missionaries. They're so conflicted. Their lives are so in battle. I just hope they know. You help them know they smell so good to God. That's the starting place of this picture. It's not the ending place. It's the starting place of this picture. And then comes this almost unbearable effect on people of this fragrance. There's a heart rejoicing and a heart-breaking part to it, isn't there? The aroma of Christ in Paul suffering to God, this aroma divides the world. So let's read how that happens in verses 15 and 16. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and those who are perishing, to the one, fragrance from death to death, to the other, of fragrance from life to life. Some people smell the sacrificial love of Christ embodied in the suffering apostle as a stench of the grave. They hear the gospel and they hear death. They look at the cross and they see death. They see no life, no hope, no future, no joy, and they turn away. And if they turn away forever, they perish. And the smell becomes a death smell for them. They don't see Christ as precious and they don't see His suffering as a treasure. They don't smell His death for sinners as the sweetest fragrance in the universe. They just smell death. And then the other side in verse 16, "To want a fragrance from death to death to the other, a fragrance from life to life." For those who are being saved, the smell of the death of Jesus seen in the suffering of the missionary and the truth of the gospel that they speak. For some, it is a fragrance from life to life. They smell the neuroma of life. They see a substitute for their sins and they say, "That's the sweetest news I've ever heard in my life." That in facing an all holy God, this sinner could have a substitute so that He carries my sin, bears my wrath, provides my righteousness, opens life. That really smells good and they live from life to life, two pictures. Picture number one, Christ conquered Paul, brought him into His slave service, put him in Christ Jesus so that it was a sweet saver to Saul, to Paul, and yet owe the pain of the missionary life in the service of the king, a lot of shame, a lot of rejection, a lot of laughter, a lot of privation, a lot of difficulties. Nobody should go into missions out of the romance that you might get a biography written about you someday, it ain't going to happen, but it will be written in heaven and it smells very good to God. And the other picture, the death of Christ as a sweet aroma to the Father and we taking that mission on to represent Him, we become then an aroma to God and to the world to some from life to life and others they smell death and it leads to their death which leads Paul to one last question and I'm going to close with this question and an answer to it. Paul got to this point in the text and to find out whether you are tracking with Him emotionally, you need to ask whether or not what He says next surprises you because what He says next is who is sufficient for these things. Now what does that mean? What did He feel so overwhelming at that point? And it's this, if you knew that tomorrow, no let's say Monday, Monday which for some of you is tomorrow, you were going to go to Nicolette Mall and walk down among all those people and as you walked some would get behind you and walk with you and be saved and everybody else would drop dead, everybody. Would that feel heavy? Would you want to go there? Wouldn't you be tempted to say I don't think I can do that? Who is sufficient for these things? I'm going to be a divider of the human race in India. Who can bear this? That's the question that He asks in verse 16 at the end. Who is sufficient for these things? Now in one sense of course the answer is nobody but that's not Paul's answer here. He said in chapter 1 verse 12 that by the grace of God He had this ministry. He said that also in Romans 1, 5 and here in chapter 3 verse 5 just drop down 6 verses to chapter 3 verse 5 and you see our sufficiency, this is at the end of verse 5, our sufficiency is from God. So no, nobody is sufficient in themselves. There are no sufficient missionaries, no sufficient pastors, no sufficient anybody who's following Jesus. We all lean like cripples on God. So I think one of the most crucial questions now that you can ask yourself as we come toward the end of this service is whether you can do this. Can I do this? Can I bear the weight of being the aroma from life to life? Yeah that would be glorious and death to death that would be almost unbearable to see people turn away even if you shake the dust off your feet as a judgment against them. So can you do it? And the answer I believe is given in whether you deal with verse 17 a certain way. All gives here five tests to help you know whether you can do this. And I'm going to take these five tests and turn them into questions and close with those five questions, okay? So these are five questions for everyone and how you answer them I think will encourage you that by God's grace you can do this. Number one, do you treasure Christ enough so that you don't peddle His word? Or we are not like so many peddlers of God's word. We don't sell the word of God. That means we love Christ more than we love money. We don't love money and use Christ. We love Christ and can let money go. That's the first question, do you love Christ more than you love money? Question number two, now here the next four questions come in four phrases which strictly grammatically modify the word speak. So it's literally we speak from sincerity. We speak from God. We speak before God. We speak in Christ. That's the four next questions. So let's take them one at a time, turn them into questions, one or two. Will you speak from sincerity? That is, will you mean what you say? Will you renounce all sham, all pretense, all need to look like what you're not? Will you be real? Question number three, will you speak from God, translated in the ESV, commissioned by God. That's one meaning. Will you speak from God? That is, will you take His word and speak it? Not your own word. Will you take His authority and speak it? Not your own authority. Will you take His wisdom, power, and live in it, not your own wisdom and power? Will you always look away to His word, power, wisdom, lean on Him, be from Him. Question number four, will you speak as before God, which I think means, will you count Him to be your judge and no man? That is, will you fear no man and know that God alone is the one to whom you give account? Will you play to one audience and not worry about what other people say? Will you not be deterred by the criticism of other people, but only look away to your Father and by His word, discern His approval before God? Finally, will you speak in Christ? That is, will you get your identity from being in Christ? Will you get your assurance before God from being in Christ, not from whether you stayed in Pro as the perfect amount of time? I promise you, if you're wired like John Piper, every day you will go to bed uncertain whether you lived your life the way you should. Every day, because I have so many options, a constant selective neglect of good things is what my life seems to be made up of. Have I made good choices? How can I sleep in Christ is my only hope for going to bed with any peace at all. OK, I didn't stay in Pro as long enough, I'm sorry, I'll try to do better next time. Thank you for the blood. How else can you live in Christ for your assurance, in Christ for your hope, in Christ for your confidence, in Christ for your courage, everything flowing from the union with Christ? There are no perfect missionaries. The answer to these questions, I hope in all of your hearts, was something like this. Yes? Yes, in as much as I know my own heart, that's my longing, that's my commitment. I don't, there are folds and contours of my heart where hidden things lie, I know, wins me from hidden faults, but in as much as I know my own heart, yes to those questions. Help me, help me to love you more than money, help me to be real and sincere, help me to speak your word, help me to fear no man, help me to get all I need from being in Christ. Thank you for listening to this resource from DesiringGod.org. If you found it helpful, we encourage you to enjoy and share from thousands of resources on our site, including books, sermons, articles, and more, available free of charge. 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No one can bear the responsibility and weight of missions, but our sufficiency is from God.