Paul pleads with the Corinthians not to receive the grace of God in vain. "Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2, ESV). This is God's appointed moment, not someday. Paul shows what a life shaped by grace looks like: endurance in suffering, strength in weakness, "having nothing, yet possessing everything." Then he opens his heart to a church that wounded him and asks them to widen theirs. A guarded heart cannot open itself. Christ opens it through the Word, the sacraments, and prayer. Now is the time.

Robby Plemmons, CrossPoint Presbyterian Church, Park City UT. 2 Corinthians 6:1-13.

The Heidelberg Catechism opens by asking, "What is your only comfort in life and in death?" Paul answers in 2 Corinthians 5 with a tent and a building — a body that is fragile and temporary, and a home from God that is eternal in the heavens. Rev. Robby Plemmons preaches on the three things that hold us: God's grace secures us, faith in Christ sustains us, and Christ himself will commend us on the last day. Most of us live as though we have to keep everything in the air. Paul says the future is already settled, and that frees us to walk by faith, not by sight.

Corinth was a status-conscious city, and the church there had taken on its values: eloquence, credentials, visible power. Then the “super-apostles” arrived with all of it in spades — and beside them stood Paul, unimpressive in speech, beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked. If God were really behind this man, wouldn’t his ministry look like more?

Paul does not defend his strength. He argues that the weakness they would use to disqualify him is the very proof that the power is God’s and not his own. “We have this treasure in jars of clay” — not fine pottery, but ordinary earthenware, and the fragility is deliberate.

Afflicted, but not crushed. Perplexed, but not driven to despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed. So the place where you feel weakest may not be a liability at all. It may be exactly where God has chosen to put His glory on display.

2 Corinthians 4:1-18 — Rev. Robby Plemmons — September 6, 2026 — CrossPoint Presbyterian Church, Park City, Utah.

Paul says the law came with real glory — but a fading one. Like a sunset that points to the sun, it was never meant to be the destination. It is a referee who calls every play correctly and can never once enter the game on your behalf.

So where does actual change come from? Not from trying harder. Paul takes the veil off Moses’ face and lays it over the human heart, then tells us how it comes off: not by cleaning ourselves up first, but by turning to Christ — carrying our sin with us rather than waiting until we have dealt with it ourselves. We become what we behold. And when we behold Him, we are transformed, from one degree of glory to another.

You do not have to be the hero of your own story. Turn and look.

2 Corinthians 3:7-18 — Rev. Robby Plemmons — August 30, 2026 — CrossPoint Presbyterian Church, Park City, Utah.

Brad Carpenter opens by explaining why he is standing there: an old-fashioned preaching exchange. Robby is in Sacramento, where his son Hudson has just taken a job, preaching at the church Brad normally serves. Brad's eldest daughter has just moved into the dorms at the University of Utah. So they swapped pulpits.

Philemon is the shortest of Paul's letters and among the most uncomfortable. Onesimus is a runaway slave. Paul is sending him back - to a man with every legal right to punish him - carrying a letter asking that he be received not as property but as a beloved brother.

Paul does not command it, though he says plainly that he could. He asks. And then, in his own handwriting: if he owes you anything, charge it to my account.

Formerly useless to you, Paul writes. Now useful to both of us.

He could have ordered it. He wrote a letter instead, and put his own name against the debt.

In 2008, Robby applied to be head football coach at Mississippi State.

Not as a joke. He wrote a full proposal: a fraction of the $32 million Alabama had just committed to Nick Saban, with the remaining thirty million placed in an endowment so that players who graduated could apply for grants to start businesses and nonprofits in their hometowns, each paired with an alumni mentor. Use the absurd economics of college football to rebuild small-town Mississippi.

His qualifications: he had once coached his six-year-old son's flag football team, because the actual coach failed to turn up to the first practice.

The athletic director wrote back, graciously, to say they were going in a different direction. Then his father-in-law suggested asking for it on official letterhead. It arrived. He framed it and hung it on the wall.

Why frame a rejection? Because underneath the joke sits the thing everyone wants - for somebody to sign off on us. To put our name on letterhead and certify that we are the real thing.

Which is precisely what 2 Corinthians 3 is about. Paul's rivals arrive carrying letters of recommendation. Paul has none.

He has a church instead. You are our letter, he tells them. Written not with ink.

In 1986 his mother asked whether he wanted to be a preacher when he grew up. He said yes. She asked whether he knew what a preacher was. He said yes - a Top Gun pilot.

Forty years on he is preaching, and his mother is in the pews.

The passage is 2 Corinthians 2:12-17 and the claim is blunt: true Christian ministry is marked by weakness and suffering. Not by results, not by platform. Paul reaches Troas to find a door standing open for the gospel, and leaves anyway, because Titus is not there and he cannot rest.

There is a second story here, and it is a Utah one. A former LDS bishop across the street, working to convert him, gets a version of Pascal's wager in return. If I become a Mormon and Christianity is true, I lose everything. If I stay a Christian and Mormonism is true, I am told I still get in. So what exactly do I gain? The neighbor's answer: you are missing out on all the blessings in this life.

That is the crux of it, and it is not only a Mormon answer. Plenty of Christians preach the same thing in different words.

We are the aroma of Christ. To some the smell of life, to others of death.

Chapter and verse numbers were added centuries after these letters were written, and sometimes they were added badly. This is one of those places. The passage runs straight across the break between chapters 1 and 2, because the argument does.

And the argument is awkward. Paul planted this church, promised to return, then did not. Instead he sent a letter severe enough that the Corinthians are still smarting from it. Now he writes again, defending a change of plan, defending the tone of what he wrote, and defending himself against people using both against him.

It is among the most situation-specific passages in the New Testament: a first-century conflict between a founder and a congregation, with details we only half know. Which is what makes the turn in it remarkable. Mid-defense, Paul stops and says that all the promises of God find their Yes in him. The man accused of saying yes and no in the same breath answers by pointing at the one who never has.

Tim Fox wrote his doctoral thesis on repentance and restoration in this letter, and it shows in how carefully he handles it.

Paul's plans changed. That was never the thing under threat.

Every song has a melody that makes it that song and not another. Simeon Trust teaches that every book of the Bible has one too - a single sustained sentence the whole book hangs on, which every passage connects back to. For 2 Corinthians it is this: God's power is perfected in weakness.

That line, brought back from a preaching workshop in the valley earlier this year, is what opens this series. Hold onto it. It is the thread through everything that follows.

But first, Corinth. In 146 BC a Roman general leveled the city and killed or enslaved everyone in it. Cicero had called it the light of all Greece. It lay in ruins for roughly a century before Rome rebuilt it - and what got rebuilt was a boom town of freedmen and traders, a place obsessed with status precisely because almost nobody there had inherited any.

Paul plants a church in that city. Then he writes to it about comfort - the word lands again and again in the opening paragraphs - and about affliction, and about why the two are not opposites at all.

A church built on rubble, in a city that worshipped strength.

God's power is perfected in weakness. In Corinth, of all places.

It is usually called the Lord's Prayer, and this sermon argues that is the wrong name. Jesus never prayed it - he taught it. Better to call it the disciples' prayer, or the model prayer. When you pray, pray like this.

It begins where the real questions are. In Park City you can talk about meditation all day and nobody blinks. Christian prayer is stranger. Does it change anything? Do people who pray look any different from anyone else?

And then the harder version of the question, which had surfaced publicly that week after an attack on a house of worship: what good are your thoughts and prayers when they don't even keep the pews safe?

The sermon takes that seriously and locates the mistake inside it. The assumption is that prayer obligates God to deliver physical safety - that if his people are gathered and praying, he owes them protection. But God's people have never been promised safety in this world. Persecution is normal, not an anomaly.

So what is prayer for, if not that? Matthew 6 answers, and the answer opens with a word about who is listening.

Our Father. Everything else follows from that.

He was a teenager, far too old for it, and terrified of the dark. When the lights went out he would hear footsteps in a hallway barely a few feet long. So he worked out a plan. There was a narrow gap between his bed and the wall, and he slept in it - reasoning that anyone who came to harm him would look in, see an empty bed, and leave.

Then there is the boy whose mother sends him out to the porch for the broom. He tells her he is afraid of the dark. She reassures him: don't worry, Jesus is out there. He thinks about it, opens the screen door a crack, and calls out - Jesus, if you're out there, will you hand me the broom?

Both are funny. Neither is only funny, because plenty of us know Jesus is the answer and still cannot make ourselves trust him while we are frightened. All you can see is the thing in front of you.

Luke 12 is Jesus on exactly this. Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will wear. Consider the ravens. Consider the lilies.

He does not tell them the dark is empty. He tells them who is in it.

Here is the practical question this sermon opens with. A coworker hears you mention your faith, becomes genuinely curious, and asks where to start. What do you hand them?

The answer is Mark.

If they already know a little, John works. But for someone starting cold, Mark is the place. Sixteen chapters. Readable in under ninety minutes, less time than a film. Jesus in close-up and constantly moving - the word immediately appears forty-two times, and the pace of the book is part of its argument.

It is also the most straightforward of the four. Not simple, but not obscure. Someone can pick it up without a guide and follow what is happening.

And its subject is discipleship, which is to say a call rather than a description. Mark 1 has Jesus arriving in Galilee announcing that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand, and then two words that are not suggestions: repent, and believe.

Then he walks past some fishermen, says follow me, and they leave their nets in the boat.

Where should someone new to the Bible begin? Where Jesus begins. With a call.

John tells you why he wrote his Gospel, and he does it near the end. Jesus did many other signs that are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

Everything in John is selected toward that. It is not a biography trying to be complete. It is a case being made.

One thing this sermon clears up in passing: Christ is not a surname. It is a title - the Greek behind Messiah, the anointed one, God's chosen. Jesus the Christ.

Then there is the opening, which starts neither with a birth nor a genealogy but before both. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through him. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

Matthew starts with Abraham. Luke goes back to Adam. John goes back further than there is a back to go.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.