Sermon Tone Analysis

Jars of Clay

A Pocket Paper \\ from \\ The Donelson Fellowship \\ *______________*

*Robert J. Morgan \\ *March 11, 2007

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/But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us /(2 Corinthians 4:7, NIV).

~*~*~*

 

I read about a man whose route to work every day took him through a particular park in the city, and every day he saw an old fellow sitting on the park bench.

This fellow was an illegal bookie, but the businessman didn’t know that.

The old fellow always looked forlorn, and the businessman thought he was homeless.

One day en route to work, the businessman felt a surge of compassion for the fellow and as he passed by he handed him an envelope containing ten dollars and a note saying “Never Despair.”

The next as he passed by the old man handed the businessman an envelope containing sixty dollars.

The old codger explained:  “Never Despair was in the money paying six to one in the second race.”

Well, we always win when we make up our minds to Never Despair.

That was Paul’s attitude.

He rode that horse in every race, and it never failed him.

And it’s a message that we still need in life and in our labor for the Lord.

We’ve been noticing recently how much despair certain celebrities have.

It’s really very sad.

We’ve followed the tragic sagas of Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears.

This week Rosie O’Donnell announced that she’s battling depression.

This week the rock star Van Halen checked himself in rehab to deal his demons.

This week, a star of the television program “Prison Break” has been arrested for manslaughter because of a fatal car wreck that was alcohol related.

I think we should all just thank the Lord we’re not celebrities.

But even us ordinary mortals face a lot of problems and pressures in life.

That’s one of the reasons the Lord gave us the book of 2 Corinthians.

This is, in essence, a 13-chapter memoir on living with stress and pressure from a Christian point of view.

It’s the most autobiographical of Paul’s writings.

And throughout this book are wonderful insights on dealing with a stressful life.

One of the richest chapters in 2 Corinthians is this chapter 4, and the heart of the chapter is verse 7, and I want us to see this powerful little verse and to study it in its context:

 

/But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us./

There are three words in this verse that I’d like for you to circle, and three attitudes that I’d like for you to jot down along side of them.

I’d like to give you the outline up front, so that we’ll have a framework for filling in the details.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->Ø      <!--[endif]-->The first word is /treasure, /and therefore we should be happy.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->Ø      <!--[endif]-->The second word is /clay, /and therefore we should be humble.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->Ø      <!--[endif]-->The third word is /power, /and therefore we should be hopeful.

*Treasure: We Should Be Happy*

Let’s start with that first word, /treasure/.

This verse begins:  /But we have this treasure….

/Let’s condense that down:  /We have this treasure….

/We can condense it a little more:  /We have treasure./

/ /

Now underline that!

We have treasure.

We possess something very valuable.

We are wealthy people.

The Greek word that Paul used here for treasure is θησαυρός.

We get our English word thesaurus from this word as a direct transliteration.

A thesaurus is a treasury of words.

Well, the actual Greek term originally meant a place for storing valuables, and it came to refer to the valuables themselves.

In the New Testament, Matthew uses this word more than anyone else.

After all, Matthew was a tax collector, and he seems to have looked at things through the grid of a treasury.

For example, turn to Matthew 13, which we call the Parables of the Kingdom.

In this chapter, Jesus gave a series of analogies regarding the Kingdom of Heaven.

And in Matthew 13:44, He said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a θησαυρός , a treasure that a man found in a field.

When the man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”

In biblical times when there were no banks, people would often bury their treasures.

Sometimes they would forget where they buried them, perhaps because of old age or dementia, or they would die and no one would know about them.

Fred Prouty, our TDF member, on the staff of the Tennessee Historical Commission, and told me about a man just south of Murfreesboro during the Civil War who had a large amount of money—most of it in gold coins.

It was the family fortune.

When the Union forces drove into the area in 1862, he was afraid they would take his money.

Of course, the banks were not good.

But the man’s property was located on a main road between Murfreesboro and Shelbyville along a ridge and surrounded by large fields.

So this man decided to bury his family fortune in a field across the road from his farm house, and he made careful mental notes as to the exact location of the buried treasure, using existing trees and creating some type of rock formation that he would easily recognize when he returned.

This man was a staunch Confederate sympathizer and he fled the region for his own safety, and he wasn’t able to return home for a long time.

Meanwhile, the Federal Army camped on this ridge and in this field, and the soldiers cut down the trees for firewood.

They gathered up the rocks to form crude chimney bases for their barracks and for campfire pits.

\\ Finally the troops moved off, the war ended, and the man returned; but much time had passed and everything was different and he was unable to locate the spot where he had buried his family fortune.

He supposedly spent the remainder of his life trying to locate the lost coins.

Interestingly, there were newspaper reports in 1985 about a number of men with metal detectors finding gold coins, and it became a court case in which the judge ruled, in simple terms, “finders keepers.”

Well, this is the kind of story Jesus is telling here.

A man plowing his field unearthed a box full of treasure, and he was incredibly excited.

The word Jesus used to describe it was joy.

In fact, the textual experts tell us that the emphasis of the whole sentence is on the concept of joy.

One commentary said that the words /In his joy/ are placed in emphatic position in the Greek text, and many translations put it first in the clause in order to underline its importance in the verse….

“/In his joy/ can be rendered as ‘He became very, very happy and went ...’ or ‘Because he was so happy, he went and sold ....’”  (Newman, B. M., & Stine, P. C. (1992).

/A Handbook on the Gospel of Matthew/.

Originally published: A translator's handbook on the Gospel of Matthew, c1988.

UBS helps for translators; UBS handbook series (435).

New York: United Bible Societies.)

This is a picture of our lives when we discover Jesus Christ.

When we discover Christ, we find great treasure, and we are excited with a joy that will never fade and an exuberance that will endure forever.

That’s the idea here in Matthew 13, and we can take these same themes back to 2 Corinthians 4 because Paul is using the same set of ideas.

When Paul uses the word treasure here in 2 Corinthians, he’s talking about the treasure of knowing Christ and making Him known.

When I was a college student, my school—Columbia International University—had as its slogan the words:  “To Know Him and to Make Him Known.”

That’s the essence of the Christian life.

There is joy in knowing Jesus and joy in making Him known; and I think both ideas are interwoven into the context of this 2 Corinthians 4.  Look at the way the chapter begins:

 

/Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry…/

/ /

That’s the theme of this passage.

Through God’s mercy we not only have a Christian life, we have a Christian ministry.

God in His mercy has given us a purpose to fulfill and a job to do.

/Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry we do not lose heart.

/

/ /

The implication Paul is making is this:  “I may be tempted to lose heart; there might be times when I feel like giving up.

But because God in His mercy has given me the treasure of knowing Christ and working for Him, I absolutely will not lose my morale or my enthusiasm or my commitment.

I’m going to be upbeat, and I’m also going to be upright.”

Look at the next verse:

/ /

/Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways.

We do not use deception nor do we distort the word of God.

On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly, we commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.

And even if our Gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.

The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus sake./

/ /

The subject of this paragraph has to do with working for the Lord and sharing Christ.

Paul is referring here not only to the treasure of knowing Christ, but to the privilege of making Him known.