2 Corinthians chapter 8 and we'll read throughout the entire chapter. The text that we're going to be looking at this morning is in verse 9 of this chapter, and it in many respects is kind of Isolated from the general theme of the chapter, and yet I think you'll see as we talk about it in a few moments that it fits in with the overall theme of the chapter. But we'll be looking at the focus, particularly in that verse, rather than the general focus of the chapter as a whole. So follow along, please, as I read God's word. Second Corinthians and Chapter eight. We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia. For in a severe test of affliction. Their abundance of joy in their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For they gave according to their means as I can testify, and beyond their means of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints. And this, not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then, by the will of God, to us. Accordingly, we urge Titus that, as he had started, So he should complete among you this act of grace. But as you excel in everything in faith and speech and knowledge and all earnestness and in our love for you, see that you excel in this act of grace also. I say this not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others that your love also is genuine. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor so that you by his poverty might become rich. And in this manner, I give my judgment. This benefits you who a year ago started not only to do this work, but also to desire to do it. So now finish doing it as well. so that your readiness and desiring it may be matched by your completing it out of what you have. For if the readiness is there, it is acceptable according to what a person has, not according to what he does not have. For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of fairness, your abundance at the present time should supply their need. so that their full abundance may supply your need and that there may be fairness. As it is written, whoever gathered much had nothing left over and whoever gathered little had no lack. But thanks be to God. who put into the heart of Titus the same earnest care I have for you. For he not only accepted our appeal, but being himself very earnest, he is going to you of his own accord. With him we are sending the brother who is famous among you, among all the churches, for his preaching of the gospel. And not only that, But he has been appointed by the churches to travel with us as we carry out this act of grace that is being ministered by us for the glory of God, for the glory of the Lord himself, and to show our goodwill We take this course so that no one should blame us after this generous gift that is being administered by us. For we aim at what is honorable, not only in the Lord's sight, but also in the sight of men. And with them, we are sending our brother, whom we have often tested and found earnest in many matters. but who is now more earnest than ever because of his great confidence in you. As for Titus, he is my partner and fellow worker for your benefit. As for our brothers, they are messengers of the churches, the glory of Christ. So give proof before the churches of your love and of our boasting about you to these men. God's blessing on reading of his word in our study of it, and then we'll talk a little more about what is taking place here. Lord God, we thank you that your word speaks to us clearly and directly day by day. We do pray that you would give us understanding and application. Help us to know what you want us to learn from this. We pray that you would, by your Holy Spirit, instruct us and guide us in our understanding and in our application of this Word. We pray it in Christ's name and for his sake. Amen. I think most of you are at least somewhat familiar with what's taking place here. Paul writing to the Corinthians is urging them to be careful, to be faithful in doing what they promised to do. Apparently started about a year earlier that they were of this and it's the references to the need of the Jerusalem Church. The. poverty that was taking place there and the particular needs of the saints there in Jerusalem. And so Paul in his missionary journeys has encouraged others to help support the work in Jerusalem and many churches are giving to that. And apparently the Corinthians had promised to do this and had started doing this about a year earlier and it's not been completed yet. And Paul wants to make sure that the promise is completed faithfully by the Corinthian people that they might share in the work of the ministry in this way. As I mentioned, the thing that I want us to focus on particularly is found in verse nine this morning, which is in some respects a little bit different from that overall theme, but it fits in in this way. Often when The New Testament writers are encouraging Christians to be engaged in some particular grace or characteristic that is evident of their Christian faith and that sort of thing. We often find them. of encouraging the believers to be diligent in their duty in this area because Christ was faithful in that same kind of a thing. And it's interesting that in this eighth chapter, Paul continually refers to this matter of giving to the needs of the saints in Jerusalem, the needs of those that are in financial distress at this particular time. He refers to it as being a grace of God. It's something that is a part of their Christian activity that he calls a grace, a grace of God. And so we often find Paul and the other New Testament writers encouraging believers to behave faithfully, to exhibit this particular kind of characteristic or whatever it might be by giving them an example of how Christ had done that in his own life. Probably the chief example of this might be the command that we are to love one another. And the scriptures remind us that we do that because God first loved us. Christ loved us and gave himself for us. And So Paul is using that same method in that same pattern as he in this chapter is encouraging these Corinthians to be faithful in the ministry of giving of their abundance at this time to those who are in particular need. But. The focus that I want us to look at this morning is in verse 9, where Paul says, You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich. And so the reason under all of this encouragement for giving to the needs of these needy saints is based on the life and manner of Jesus Christ. And that's what I want us to focus on for a little bit this morning. And as we think about that, the first thing I'd like us to think about just a little bit is that Paul is indicating to us that Christ originally was rich. And that's something that, in many respects, I suppose we take for granted. We may assume that who would ever question that idea. But Paul is making a point of it, that Christ was, in fact, rich. And when you think about it, Paul, in writing to the Christians there in Corinth, who would only have known about Christ from Paul's teaching and and perhaps the Paulist teaching and some of the others that had ministered there, Priscilla and Aquila, perhaps, and others, they would have only known particularly about the ministry of Jesus here on this earth. And when you think about that, then you have to recognize that on this earth, Christ had no real evidence of riches at all. The text has no meaning if we only are thinking about his life here on earth. So we have to go beyond that and behind that and recognize that what Paul is talking about here is the preexistent nature of Christ in his eternal existence in the Godhead. And so when we consider that, when we think about the doctrine of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, all one God yet existing in three persons, then we begin to see something of the riches that Jesus Christ had in the eternity, in the eternity past with God the Father and the Holy Spirit. And we can begin to grasp then this, this idea that Paul is saying Christ really was rich. He was rich and abundant in all sorts of categories that we might think about. He was rich in the attributes of the deity. He was rich in power, the almighty power, omnipotent power. omniscience in his knowledge and all of the things that are associated with the Godhead in this way. If you think about the attributes of deity, Christ was rich in all of that. He was overall. He was, as we read particularly in Revelation, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He was sovereign over all things and in every way. And we're told, in fact, that it's by him all things were created. Usually when we talk about creation, we say God created, and that's certainly a true statement. But as we look through the scriptures, we find that that in the description of how the creation is taking place, it's taking place by the Word of God. And Jesus is called the Word of God in John. And when you come to Colossians, we're told that that Jesus is the one that that actually brought about the power of creation and brought it into existence. And even beyond that, it's by his power that all things hold together in the universe. That's the glue that keeps it together in this way. And so, you know, if we think about earthly things, we often associate one manner of riches with vast wealth in having the possession of a great deal of land. A landowner that owns thousands of acres or a landowner that owns one of the very important buildings in downtown Denver or some other large city. That person must be a really wealthy person. Well, as we look to the scripture, we find that the scripture says the earth is the Lord's. The whole earth belongs to him. In fact, in another place, it says that if he had need, he wouldn't come and ask us for it. The cattle on a thousand hills belong to him. And so, we see the riches of Christ in that aspect as well. The whole universe is his. Christ is rich in glory and honor. He received the praises and the worship of angels, and every part of creation reflects his glory. And so, these riches of Christ that Paul is alluding to here, and that we need to kind of have a background understanding of, the riches of Christ are They're underrived. They don't come from someone giving him the riches there is by his very nature as the eternal son, the second person in the Godhead. They're eternal. They're not transient that you might lose one day and no longer have those riches. They're inexhaustible. And Christ was certainly rich in every sense of the word. But the point then that Paul gets to following that, even though Christ was rich, he tells us secondly that Christ became poor. And it's a voluntary poverty that Christ is engaged in here. It's not somehow accidental. It's not that the stock market crashed and he lost the value that he had of his possessions. It wasn't that some misfortune came upon him and the lands were burned up or destroyed in some way or anything like that. The poverty here is entirely voluntary on Christ's part. And the scripture indicates to us that he chose To do this for the good of his chosen elect for those for whom he had set his love on from all eternity. So this poverty of Christ that that he became poor is engaged in the matter of his becoming one of us that he was born among us. He took upon himself our very nature. He took upon himself a human body. He was born into this world And this this was the the work that he came to do was conceived by the Holy Spirit. So he was without sin, but he had the frailties of flesh and blood. He got hungry. The scripture talks about his getting tired and needing to rest. He he was born into this work. He became a man in a mysterious way that we cannot comprehend, but he continues to be both God and man. And this is divine mystery. It's beyond our human comprehension, certainly. But that's what Paul is alluding to when he talks about the riches of Christ on the one hand and his becoming poor on the other. We can't really begin to conceive of what was involved in this transition that is taking place here. This this transformation, if you will. Jesus Christ, the eternal son of God, The second person of the Trinity. Very God of very God, as the creeds have declared it. Assuming and assimilating the various teachings of all passages of scripture. This person took upon himself flesh and blood, a true human nature. And, you know, we can try and imagine things. We might imagine how a king becomes a servant. He's no longer a king and now he's a servant or a slave. But that really doesn't grasp it. That's a change of office. It's not the kind of change that we're talking about here. We might even imagine an angel, even an archangel, becoming a lowly worm that's crawling around on the earth. But but that's a change within creatureness. And Christ was not a creature in that way. He's the eternal son of God. It's a it's a change that is beyond our really ability to comprehend and understand when God became man, it was far more than any of those changes that we might imagine. It involved the union of eternity into a span of time involved omnipotent power coming into union with the weakness of human flesh. It involves all of these things and more involves the perfection of Almighty God joined with the frailty and weakness of man made in the likeness of sinful flesh, but without sin. There was no sin found in him. We need to note that Christ didn't choose to assume our nature in kingly form. He came into. this world born as a baby in a manger, the child of a very low class of people. His father was a carpenter. He ended up laboring as a carpenter himself many times. Throughout his life, his worldly possessions were meager and his own occupation lowly. And at his death, the scripture indicates that the only worldly possessions that he had were the clothes on his back. He didn't have possessions that needed to be willed to someone else. He was even buried in another person's grave. And Christ's reputation also was poor on this earth. When we think about his riches and the honor and glory that belongs to the triune Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, very God of very God, in human form, he was despised and rejected. Solomon said a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches. And Christ's name was continually being vilified while he was here on this earth. We often find that he was reviled by those around him. True, there were those who praised him and followed him, at least for a time, but we also find those others that are accusing him of being a glutton and a wine-bibber, a drunkard, if you will. He was faulted for being found in the company of publicans and sinners and prostitutes. He was described as being illegitimate himself. We'll never be able to soar high enough to really grasp Christ's original riches. But by the same token, I think we truly will never be able to really fathom the depths of his poverty as well. And so the question is, why did Christ do this? And Paul tells us very simply. Christ chose to become poor so that we might become rich. There's an exchange that's taking place here. Our riches come at the cost of his poverty. And we might say, well, what does that mean? How does that work out? Well, there are a number of things that I think are implied to us by that. Certainly, one thing that we should be reminded of is our own original poverty. Each one of us as sinners are poor in that sense. We're truly poor. Now, we may have physical riches. We may have wealth and money and possessions and that sort of thing. But spiritually, we're poor. When God created this world and all that's in it, he created Adam and Eve rich. They didn't have that poverty. They had a garden that was beautiful, no weeds. They would take care of the garden and care for it. They had the responsibility of looking after the animals of the field and all of the creation that was there. And God said that they should be fruitful and multiply and take care of all of this creation. And so they were rich indeed in that sense prior to the fall into sin. They had the measure of true holiness and godliness and righteousness that was theirs at that time. But all of this was lost with the entrance of sin into the world. God had warned and charged that if they disobeyed him, if they ate the forbidden fruit, they would die. They would surely die. And they did. Now, they didn't die physically immediately, but they died spiritually immediately, just like that. They were no longer in communion with God. They were no longer in fellowship with God. They no longer had that true knowledge and righteousness and holiness that had once been theirs. They were now at enmity with God and the gulf had been given there. They no longer could walk and talk with God. They hid themselves from God and covered their nakedness in shame. their spiritual death took place immediately. Their physical death took place over a longer period of time. And you've maybe wondered sometimes why it is that it seems like some of the early men and women in the creation lived such a long time and then shorter and then shorter and shorter until finally in the Psalms we're told that 4 score and 10 or 3 score and 10 would be the normal age life expectancy. I'm persuaded that that's because over the course of time the effects of sin began to degrade the body more and more so that the first Adam and Eve and Methuselah and some of the others lived longer because the effects of sin had not affected them as much as it began to do later on. But their riches had turned into poverty. They had lost their inheritance. They'd lost their health. They'd lost their crown of glory. They'd lost their happiness. And all mankind became poor and miserable in sin. And Paul is reminding us in this text that by the grace of God, through the person of Jesus Christ who was rich, who voluntarily chose to become poor, that we might once again be rich in Christ. Christ became poor so that he might make us rich. We know the scripture account of how that takes place. We read of the sacrifices in Leviticus 8 and that in some way is a picture of what Christ is going to do later on. But Christ left the riches of his eternal glory that he might come into this world and live among us and do that which was necessary. Paul captures this very clearly and extensively in Philippians, the second chapter. Philippians chapter two, particularly verses five through eight. In that chapter, he's encouraging the Philippian Christians to live godly lives of humility. And just like he does here in 2nd Corinthians 8, he says, look at the example of Christ, how he did that. And in Philippians 2, beginning at verse 8, he describes something of the humility of Christ that took place. He said. This is in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped. but emptied himself by taking the form of a serpent, being born in likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. See, Christ was paying for our riches by his life and death here on this earth. He lived the life of perfect obedience that Adam failed to do. God commanded Adam and Eve to be obedient to him, to listen to his commands and follow his commands, to not eat the forbidden fruit. And they failed to do that. Christ didn't have just one command. He fulfilled all of the commands of God. Everything that you can find in Genesis through revelation that God requires of a righteous man. Jesus did. He lived a perfect life of obedience. But then he suffered the death of one who had been disobedient. He was punished as if he were a sinner, and that's that's the exchange that's taking place here. We talk about it as imputation. We've looked at that in other passages particularly, but the experience is that Christ's righteousness is accounted to me as if I had that righteousness. We'll talk more about that this evening in the study on justification. And my sinfulness is accounted to Christ as if he was guilty. So, he lived a life of perfect obedience while I lived a life of disobedience. And God counts his righteousness as my obedience. My disobedience requires and should be punished by death. Soul that sins shall die, the scripture says. And Christ died on behalf of sinners. He died in our stead. We call it the substitutionary atonement. We talk about imputation and then we talk about justification and that sort of thing. So Christ endured the poverty and the suffering and the shame and the death that is rightfully ours in order that we might be spared and that we might indeed become rich once again. No wonder Paul calls that grace. Grace is unmerited favor. And so let's let's think about this for just a moment in closing as we think about this work of Christ and how it was indeed an act of unparalleled grace. Paul says that we can know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. It's possible for us to to understand this act of grace. We can experience it in our lives. It's only as we experience this act of grace that we become aware of the truth that this is, in fact, an act of grace on the part of God in Christ. In our simple state, we often think that we deserve more than we really do. You think, well, I've been doing a pretty good job. At least I'm better than so-and-so. And in our natural inclination is to think about how well we do in all of these things. And it's only as we become aware of our sinfulness and the grace of God in Jesus Christ that we can experience this grace as we place our trust in him. Grace, as I said, by definition means something that is free and undeserved. It's unmerited. We don't have any right to it at all. In fact, it's the opposite of what we rightfully deserve. And as sinners, we deserve only poverty and misery and death. in eternal punishment, but God in His rich grace, in His abundant grace, through Jesus Christ, allowed Christ to become poor that through Him we might become rich. It's all the more evident to us that it's grace when we remember the unworthiness of those of us who receive that grace. totally undeserving, with nothing good to offer in any way, totally degraded, degraded, wretched, vile. It's it's more evident to us as we think about the sacrifice made by Christ on his part, a person of infinite worth, glory, a price that's far beyond our understanding or comprehension. We see the riches of this grace when we receive The grace that is beyond anything that we can really imagine its grace, its glory, its adoption as it's being brought into the family of God. It's all these things and more. Paul captures this very well in Ephesians, the first chapter, and I almost thought about using that as a part of our scripture reading, but let me use it as a closing part of our scripture as well. In Ephesians chapter one, In verses 3-14, Paul, writing to the Ephesians Christians, puts it this way, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us for the adoption of sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace with which He has blessed us in the Beloved. In him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our sins, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Him, we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of His glory. In Him, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of His glory. Paul certainly had it right when he was encouraging these Corinthians to be faithful in their giving to remind them that really we give nothing in comparison to what Christ has given us. As he said, you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ That though he was rich, yet for your sake, he became poor so that you by his poverty might become rich. Let's look to him in prayer. Our Father in heaven, we do thank you once again for the rich and abundant grace that is ours in the person of Jesus Christ. Father, we acknowledge and confess that as sinners we have no merit, no right, no No reason to even hope for this kind of treatment. Father, we're thankful that in your mercy and in your grace, you set your love upon your people. You chose to love your elect ones and that you finished and accomplished that work of redemption through the work of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And so we pray that you would give him the honor and glory. We pray that you would enable us to grow in our understanding and our knowledge and our application of the truths of your word. We ask these things in Christ's name and for his sake. Amen.