How would you feel if you have spent your time, energy, and money, trying to make your wife happy but one day she says she wants a divorce because she has fallen in love with someone else?
How would you feel if you have spent your life, time, and money starting a new congregation and one day it turned its back on you, calls you a false teacher, and embraces a denomination?
I can daresay that in both situations you will feel devastated. You will feel betrayed. Well, that’s how the apostle Paul felt when he wrote 2 Corinthians 11. He said to the church at Corinth: “For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ” (v.2).
Paul had a “godly jealousy”. He started the work in Corinth. He planted the church and watered it, spending his time and energy nurturing her so that he might present that church “a chaste virgin to Christ”. Christ is the bridegroom and the church is His bride (John 3:29; Revelation 21:9). Paul was devastated now that the church at Corinth had embraced certain false teachers and even doubted his credentials as an apostle.
Paul has the right to be jealous, as a jealous “husband”. Under normal circumstances, he would never want to boast about his work, or about what he had done for the church at Corinth (v.1, 10). But he felt the Corinthians needed to know about his devotion to them. What are the things they must know?
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