The Terrible Aftermath of Unextinguished Arrows.
What does a church look like when the shield of faith is unused? Open to 2 Cor. 12. Paul had more chapters devoted to this wandering congregation than any other New Testament body. The Corinthians are synonymous with the carnal life, lax morals, and disobedient lives.
They are also a church filled with all the consequences of sin: the coldness of heart, pain, divisions, lawsuits, divorces, heartaches, and the heavy hand of God’s chastening discipline upon them.
But they were saints.
That’s how the epistles to them open.
The sins that saints can get ensnared in are vividly seen in the church at Corinth.
Now turn with me onward to 2 Corinthians 12:20-21 (NKJV):
For I fear lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I wish, and that I shall be found by you such as you do not wish; lest there be contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, backbitings, whisperings, conceits, tumults;21 lest, when I come again, my God will humble me among you, and I shall mourn for many who have sinned before and have not repented of the uncleanness, fornication, and lewdness which they have practiced.
What was going on?
They were allowing all the lusts that are ever with all of us to inflame them. Always remember that: Unextinguished Arrows Start Big Fires.
A German pastor who was hanged for his faith in Christ in 1945 wrote these words in a sermon on temptation:
"In our members, there is a slumbering inclination towards desire which is both sudden and fierce. With irresistible power, desire seizes mastery over the flesh.
All at once, a secret, smoldering fire is kindled.
The flesh burns and is in flames.
It makes no difference whether it is sexual desire, or ambition, or vanity, or desire for revenge, or love of fame and power, or greed for money, or, finally, that strange desire for the beauty of the world, of nature.
Joy in God is…extinguished in us, and we seek all our joy in the creature.
At this moment, God is quite unreal to us; he loses all reality, and only the creature’s desire is real; the only reality is the devil.
Satan does not here fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God….
The lust thus aroused envelops the mind and will of man in deepest darkness.
The powers of clear discrimination and of decision are taken from us….
It is here that everything within me rises up against the Word of God.”
Wow, that sure portrays the issue of the flaming darts.
Our only hope is to remember that above all, we are to:
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