The Light of the Gospel (2 Cor. 4:5

This sermon was preached at Elevate Hope, on April 26th, 2026. The text is 2 Corinthians 4:5–18. You can listen to the sermon below. This is an edited summary.

When I was a teenager my family and I lived on the island of Haiti doing mission work in a small city on the coast. Those years were very formative, and from a young age that experience gave me a glimpse into the strange duality of Christian life.

On the one hand, I watched beautiful, incredible things happen everyday. I watched God draw people to himself, people with no hope receive the Gospel, and broken lives riddled with addiction and sin be set free.

But on the other hand I also had to watch as these renewed people continued wrestling with the brokenness around them. They received hope, but they still fought to put food on the table everyday. They were set free, but still cursed by their voodoo worshipping neighbors. They were drawn to God, and still afflicted by the world.

Have you ever sat and wondered to yourself: why is that?

What I observed in Haiti is not unique to Haiti. It is in fact the case everywhere in the world including here in Centennial, Colorado. Why is it that we have received the Gospel, and yet life is still riddled with pain and challenges? We know God, and yet our coworkers still have it out for us, we still get that awful diagnosis no one wants to get, and our children struggle more than we’d like them to.

Paul addresses this very tension with a striking analogy that is beautifully suited to Colorado. Divine light. Paul forces us to think about four different questions through this imagery that all relate to the tension we all face.

What is this light?
Where is this light?
Why is it there?
What do we do with it?

What is this light?

Paul talks endlessly here about “light,” but thankfully he does not leave us in the abstract. He defines exactly what this light is.

Verse 6, Paul begins by identifying the one speaking. God, the one who said “let light shine out of darkness,” this is Paul’s way of saying “God, the same God who spoke creation into existence." God, the God of Genesis, the God of Abraham, and God of David, God over all things – He has “shone in our hearts to give the light.” As if God has opened the door to heaven, and down from the cloud this light has pierced our hearts.

Sounds so ethereal and fantastic. But then Paul shows us exactly what this light really is.

God has shone, into our hearts, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Break that down one piece at a time. This light is knowledge. It is an understanding of something. It's not a feeling, or a sense, it's knowledge. But knowledge of what? Of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

The light that God has shone into our hearts is a real comprehension that God is glorious, and his glory is seen in his Son Jesus Christ. In the next verse, Paul will call this a “treasure.”

I want each of you good Coloradans to think back to the most brilliant mountain sunset you have ever seen in your life. There might be multiple. I can picture mine. It was the end of the summer, my wife and I were up in the Sequoia national forest and we had decided to go on a hike. We went to a place called Dome rock, which is, as you might expect, a big dome. The sun was setting and the dome was so big that you could separate yourself from the guardrails and find a nice little spot all by yourself to sit and overlook the entire Sequoia valley. We found a spot, and sat there until the sun disappeared, completely captured by the beauty of the scene. The light was pouring over the valley so wonderfully.

This is what it means to be a Christian. You see Jesus like that. God shines this light into the heart of his people, and the comprehension of Jesus’ glory becomes their treasure.

Do you find Jesus Christ glorious? Does the light of his face shine in your heart? Notice that the question is not “do you find Jesus useful? Or appealing?” To be a Christian is to have the light of the Gospel – which means you find God to be supremely awesome, glorious, beautiful. This is the light we have received.

Where is this light?

But Paul does not leave us there. As you all know, life is not that simple. “But we have this treasure in jars of clay.” This is a short but powerful statement.

Christian’s possess this incredible light, this knowing of God as being glorious, and yet this incredible truth is housed in what? Jars of clay… Well that is odd… Paul is talking about our human bodies! He calls them jars of clay, not trying to downplay the goodness of our human bodies, but trying to make a point of juxtaposition.

We hold this incredible treasure. Knowledge of the glory of God. But we hold it in frames that are weak, subject to the elements, breakable, and very much mortal. It’s a striking comparison. Like a wedding ring in its box. How bizarre. Something brilliant, contained in something rather ordinary and fragile.

Why is it there?

Now this gets to the heart of it. Why would God be pleased to place this extravagant truth in such plain frames? Paul explains exactly why. God has a purpose in this strange mix of experiences.

“To show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” In fact, this verse can be even a bit more directly translated. We have this treasure in jars of clay so that the surpassing power is God not out of us.

This glory is housed in clay in order that one thing might be very, very clear for the entirety of our lives: the true power for Christian living is God, not you. We are dependent upon him. He then goes on to explain this even further by appealing to his own life as an apostle. He gets personal by describing how this reality of light and clay has worked in his ministry.

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed. Perplexed but not driven to despair. Persecuted but not forsaken. Struck down but not destroyed. Carrying the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be made manifest. Death is at work in us, but life in you.

Paul gets personal. The backstory to this is that, at the time of writing this letter to the Corinthian church, life is very, very hard. The whole letter can be adequately described as dealing with suffering through the Gospel. He is demonstrating his own teaching, as all good teachers do. The Christian life exists in these tensions. Something incredible. Good news! Housed in weak frames that break and suffer. You and I exist in these tensions.

The world, and even some well meaning Christians will tell you that the life of faith is one of power, and success. The more we mature, the more greatness we accrue. The better our life goes. The more God blesses us in our jobs, or in our families and pleasures. Perhaps some of you in this room have bought into the idea that if you are a Christian, your life will be better in every regard. Your children will succeed. Your career will advance. You’ll get the house, and everyone will like you. But how many of us really feel like that is how life is going? We cannot make sense of that unless we see what God is saying here.

His intention is for you to hold the light of the Gospel in the midst of a broken world full of suffering – so that you may clearly understand that God alone is the only true power. He is our hope. You cannot trust in yourself or anyone else.

What do we do?

So then, where does this leave us and what do we do with this truth? Paul shows us very clearly.

Verse 16, we hold on. We don’t despair. Even though our outer-self is exposed to the elements and wasting away, the inner self is being renewed. This “inner” language is intentional. The inner self is being renewed, because that is where the light is. Paul is saying “I’m gazing at Jesus, and the light of his face renews me.

This light, momentary affliction is preparing for you a glory you cannot fathom in this life. Something better than any sunset you’ve seen. Being with Jesus himself, the Light. So we do not look to the things seen, but to the unseen, which is eternal.

If you are here this morning and you feel this tension, what do you do? Hold onto the light of the Gospel. Keep looking to Jesus, and be renewed. Notice that Paul is not saying this takes away all of our pain, or ends our suffering. It does not. What it does do is refresh our “inner person,” and we head towards heaven.

When life gets hard, people will try to give you every “trick in the book” to solve your problem. When you get news you don’t want to get, or family life is full of struggle, and all of our attempts at living the good life are falling flat – we think of everything we can to soothe our inner pain.

Try harder. Work harder. Work less. Get over it. Give into it. Prioritize pleasure. Give up all pleasure. But do you see what Paul is saying? What do you really need? What will actually see you through to the end? Looking at Jesus. His face, the truth of his gospel, brings a real renewal. Not a simple one that absolves your problems, but one that strengthens your inner being.

Helen Lemmel was a brilliant musician living in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, gifted in the arts. While in Germany she met her husband, and they were quickly married and then decided to move here to the United States where Helen spent her life teaching music and serving her church.

Tragically, a few years after her marriage, Helen fell extremely ill and ended up losing her eyesight as a result of her disease. But that is nothing compared to what came next. After losing her sight, Helen’s husband decided he did not want to spend the rest of his life caring for a blind woman and so he left her. Abandoned in their new home, rocked by her newfound condition, Helen was confronted with the frailty of humanity in a way many of us cannot imagine.

But she clung to the Lord. A few years later, she was deeply encouraged by a traveling minister in her area and in the midst of her deep suffering she recalled the Lord impressing a hymn clearly onto her heart. That very week she wrote these words: