To “love” someone, according to our society, is to affirm every decision they make and to applaud them just for being them. In fact, there is nothing more hateful, according to our corrupt culture, than to tell someone they’re wrong, and that they need to change in some considerable way in order to be pleasing to God. But this is precisely what love demands.

“For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears;
not so that you would be made sorrowful,
but that you might know the love which I have especially for you.”
– 2 Corinthians 2:4 –

When Paul wrote this verse, false teachers claiming to be apostles had infiltrated the church of Corinth and aimed to discredit Paul’s legitimacy as an apostle. The controversy led Paul to change his travel plans and visit the Corinthians ahead of schedule, as he hoped he could put the matter to rest by being there personally. But when Paul arrived in Corinth, one of the men in the church openly flouted Paul’s authority and insulted him before the whole church. To make matters worse, rather than coming to Paul’s defense and defending the Gospel that he preached, the Corinthians were taken in by this false teaching, and allowed this man’s sin to go unchecked.

After this “sorrowful visit,” Paul returned immediately to Ephesus and wrote them a severe letter, sternly rebuking them for failing to deal with sin in the church properly, and for straying from his apostolic teaching and message. In the verse quoted above, Paul explains the circumstances in which and the motivation for why he wrote the Corinthians his severe letter. And there is a pastoral lesson for all of us in the church who give and receive correction to our brothers and sisters.

This verse teaches us that Paul’s severe letter wasn’t just some sort of retaliatory catharsis, where he was venting his frustrations on the Corinthians to make himself feel better. It wasn’t because he was too much of a coward to be so forthright with them in person. It wasn’t because he was trying to be a domineering tyrant, seeking to intimidate the Corinthians into siding with him. It was so that his love for them would be made manifest. And his love for them would be made manifest when they considered what extraordinarily unpleasant lengths he was willing to go to in order to protect them from the damning effects of sin and false teaching.

He’s basically saying, “Dear friends, don’t think it was easy for me to write that letter to you. Despite what the false apostles are telling you, don’t think I took some perverse delight in confronting you like that. My Corinthians, I tell you: it was out of much affliction and anguish of heart that I wrote to you—and with many tears! I had no desire to make you sorrowful. I don’t love conflict. Frankly, it would have been much easier for me to avoid the situation entirely! But dear brothers and sisters, I love you all too much to abandon you to damning doctrines of the false apostles for the sake of avoiding difficult conversations! I love you all too much to not confront you about your sin.” Paul’s love was a sharpening love.

Love is Bold

And I want to draw out two brief lines of application from this verse. First, the love that a faithful minister has for his people requires him to be bold enough to confront sin in their lives. You see, the watered-down, wishy-washy, sentimentalized version of “love” that is propagated by our self-indulgent, perennially-adolescent culture—and sadly which has been imbibed even in the professing church—is little more than Carl Rogers’ notion of unconditional positive regard. To “love” someone, according to our society, is to affirm every decision they make and to applaud them just for being them. In fact, there is nothing morehateful, according to our corrupt culture, than to tell someone they’re wrong, and that they need to change in some considerable way in order to be pleasing to God. But this is precisely what love demands.

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