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Hi, this is Pastor Tom, and I want to welcome you to day one of 2 Corinthians
chapter two. We are looking through the book of 2 Corinthians, seeing what it
has to say to us about how to survive the realities of life. In very many ways,
it's a servant survival guide.

In chapter two, verse one, that chapter starts by saying, Paul saying, "So I
made up my mind that I would not make another painful visit to you. " That's the
truth of what we have to survive sometimes. We would like relationships to
always be joyful, but sometimes they're painful.

Sometimes we struggle. And Paul is saying here, we had pain in our relationship
even though we're all believers. As we talk about how to survive as a servant of
Christ, we realize that sometimes the servant sometimes has to survive the one
that he serves with.

The most difficult thing to survive is the hurts that we sometimes inflict on
each other as God's servants. It's always harder surviving your friends and the
struggles you have with your friends than your so-called enemies. It's that old
poem, "To live above with saints we love will certainly be glory, but to live
below with saints we know," well, that's another story.

It's hard sometimes to live with each other as God's servants. Someone has
called Christianity the only army wherein we shoot our wounded, and there is too
often truth to that. How do you survive the hurts that come from those who are
brothers and sisters in Christ?

Some of you right now, as you're listening to this, you're going through it.
You're facing that right now in your life. Others of you, it's something in your
past that maybe it still comes back from time to time and you wonder why that
happened, or it's something you might even face in the future.

Paul has several lessons about this in 2 Corinthians. In fact, we began really
looking at this last week, at this truth of how do you survive
misunderstandings? When Christians misunderstand each other, how the wounds go
very deep.

In fact, I think that misunderstanding is possibly the single greatest weapon
that Satan uses to hurt our service and our relationship with each other as
believers. A misunderstood word, a misunderstood action, a misunderstood
promise, and out of that misunderstanding, well, the problem with
misunderstandings is in the arithmetic. Misunderstandings multiply.

We start with it was just a little misunderstanding, but it starts multiplying
and multiplying and multiplying, and pretty soon you have a tremendous problem.
Paul reminds us in these chapters of two things that we have to do when
misunderstandings come in order to survive them, in order to thrive even on the
other side of them. Here are the two things you need to do.

First, you clear your conscience, and then you clear the air. You clear your
conscience, and then you clear the air. Now, part of this reaches back into
chapter 1.

In fact, as we study through 2 Corinthians, we'll see that Paul's discussions in
this book often go, start in one chapter and they finish in the next. Now, you
probably know that the chapters, the verses weren't there in the original
writing. It was just a letter.

Those were added hundreds and hundreds of years later, but sometimes in the
divisions of them, they actually don't divide in the thought of Paul, and that's
certainly true throughout 2 Corinthians. Because of the way that he speaks,
oftentimes the subject goes from one chapter to the other, and that's true here.
So I want to reach back a little bit into chapter 1, first couple of days of
this week, and then reach into chapter 2 on day 2 of this week, to see what the
Bible has to say to us here about how do you survive misunderstandings.

How do you first clear your conscience, and then how do you second clear the
air? Today we're going to talk about how do you clear your conscience. And we
began learning this last week, four things, four questions you need to ask
yourself to help you to clear your conscience.

You need to know if you're going to survive a misunderstanding, you need to know
first of all that you're in the right place. Instead of just thinking about them
and how they've misunderstood you, you go to yourself and you think about where
am I? The word conscience in the Latin means to know with.

A clear conscience allows the mind to know with the spirit. Instead of your mind
and your spirit somehow being in dissonance with each other, you're feeling
like, well, I'm trying to convince myself that this is right. You take the time
to sit down and ask yourself some questions and make sure your heart is right
before you begin to challenge somebody else's heart.

Now you're going to get there to clearing the air, but first you have to clear
your own conscience. Here are four questions that I see in the example of Paul
that we need to ask ourselves in order to do this. First question is, what was
my motivation?

You have a misunderstanding with someone. You said something, you did something,
they didn't understand it, it's turned into a thing between you. How do you
handle this?

You go back first of all and you look at your own heart and mind and you say,
what was my motivation? Not only what did I do, but why did I do it? Now Paul's
words indicated that he had a clear conscience before God.

He said in chapter one, we conducted ourselves in holiness and in sincerity. Out
of his relationship with God, he was acting. Now it may be as you ask yourself
this question, you realize you were conducting yourself with jealousy, or you
were conducting yourself with pride.

Part of clearing your conscience is admitting your sin, but in this case, Paul
was able to see, I did what I did because of my love for Christ, holiness. I had
a set apart for Christ like motivation, sincerity. That word has the idea of
unstained if examined even in the sunlight, it could stand the test of scrutiny.

Warren Wiersbie said, if you live to please people, misunderstandings will
depress you. But if you live to please God, you can face misunderstandings with
faith and courage. And Paul had been living to please God and so he was able to
face this misunderstanding.

As you ask yourself, what was my motivation? You may come to the place of
realizing, I was living to please myself. You get that right before God and then
you're ready to move ahead.

You ask, what was my motivation? And then you ask, what was my motivator? And as
Paul talked about this in chapter one, he talked about, was it worldly wisdom or
was it grace?

Was my motivator just my strategy, worldly wisdom, getting ahead, making it
work, me pushing it, me making it happen, or was it grace? God's gift, what
God's doing in this world. You see, worldly wisdom is all about self-interest
and self-promotion.

And if that was your motivator, whatever you did, even if every word you said
was right, everything you did was right, no wonder there was a misunderstanding.
People pick up on self-interest and self-promotion. But if your motivator was
God's grace, self-giving, self-sacrifice, then you can have a clear conscience.

Even if you're misunderstood, then you can have a clear conscience. A third
question you ask yourself to clear your conscience is, how clear was I? How
clear was I in what I said?

How clear was I in how I acted? Paul says, we wrote clearly to you. Many times
what we have is a failure to communicate.

Often misunderstandings arise simply because we haven't taken the time to
communicate. And that's getting worse and worse in our world. There's no doubt
about it.

The clearest communication comes in a conversation where I can see your
reactions, where you can see my reactions. When it gets to trying to communicate
through an email where you can't see the other person's face or emotions, you've
probably seen how often you can have a misunderstanding in an email when that's
not what you meant to say at all. That's not what you meant to express at all.

How clear was I? And then if it's something that's just in a simple text, 144
characters trying to express your whole heart and plan and idea, many times
there can be a misunderstanding, especially if your phone picks up on things and
actually puts the wrong word for the word you were trying to put. There's a lot
of opportunity for not being clear in the world today.

We have more tools for communication than we've ever had, but we also have more
opportunities to miscommunicate than we've ever had before. That's part of the
human condition. So how clear was I?

You ask yourself that. And if there was a place where you weren't clear, then
you clarify it. We're going to see tomorrow how Paul does that.

And then you ask yourself a fourth question to clear your conscience. You ask
yourself, do I want understanding? Do I want to reconnect with this person?

Do I want to clear up this misunderstanding? You see, sometimes there's people
we don't like, and we're pretty much okay with the fact that there's a
misunderstanding because it sort of confirms our opinion that we've had of that
person all along. Or it gives us an excuse not to talk to that person we really
don't want to talk to anyway.

Sometimes we continue to misunderstand because we want to continue to
misunderstand. Now, Paul says here, I want us to understand fully. I want us to
be able to boast of each other when we stand in the presence of the Lord Jesus
Christ.

So it was Paul's desire for understanding to begin and continue. And that should
be my desire. That should be your desire.

Even though we struggle with human beings, the truth is we know that one day
we're going to stand in the presence of the Lord together as believers. And so
because of that, it should always be our desire to say, I want understanding
that begins now and that heads all the way into heaven and what God's going to
do there. Is there a misunderstanding in your life with someone in your family,
with someone in your church, with someone at a job, especially when it's with a
fellow believer in some way?

How do you walk through that? Paul shows us the path here. First thing you do
instead of looking to them, which is easy to do.

That's where I want to start. I want to blame them. I want to shame them.

First thing you do is you look at yourself and you ask yourself these questions.
In fact, let's just take a moment in prayer to ask these questions of our own
heart and mind. Lord, give me humility.

Give me the humility when there's a misunderstanding to ask, what was my
motivation? Was it self-interest or was it your interest? What was my motivator?

Was it worldly wisdom or was it your grace? Or how clear was I? Was there
something I did that opened the door to this misunderstanding?

And do I want understanding? Lord, we know that you can speak to our hearts and
change our hearts. So we pray that as we seek you, as we look to you, that
beginning with us, you'd give us a sense of humility before you, knowing that,
Lord, you sought to understand us for long, long, long before we sought to
understand you.

You reached out to us before we reached out to you. So give us that same spirit
that you have, Jesus, with the people in our lives. Help us to seek to not only
be understood, but to understand those who are around us and to express your
love to them, we pray.

And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Tomorrow we're going to talk together
about how do you clear the air.