Wasting Away, Renewed Day by Day (2 Corinthians 4:13-18)

Today’s Word

[Fixing Our Eyes on What Is Unseen] (NIV)
13 It is written: “I believed; therefore I have spoken.” Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak,
14 because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself.
15 All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.
16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.
17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.
18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

Background

Yesterday Paul called himself a jar of clay. Pressed on every side, perplexed, hunted, knocked down. Inside that fragile jar, he said, the death of Jesus and the life of Jesus were both at work. Death in us, life in you. If the chapter had stopped there, it would have ended on a lonely note. Today’s passage is what comes next. It answers a simple question: what does a person made of clay hold on to in order to keep walking?

Paul begins by reaching for a line from the Psalms. I believed; therefore I have spoken. It comes from Psalm 116. The man who wrote that psalm had been to the edge of death. The cords of death entangled me, he says, and the anguish of the grave came over me (Psalm 116:3). From that place he called on the name of the Lord, and he was rescued. When he says I believed, therefore I spoke, he is not speaking from a comfortable chair. He is someone who kept calling on God with his mouth while pain had him by the throat. In the Greek Old Testament that Paul quotes, the very next words are, and I was greatly afflicted.

Paul puts himself in the same line as that psalmist. We have that same spirit of faith, he says. That is why he keeps speaking the gospel while he is being pressed and pursued. He does not speak because his circumstances are good. He speaks because he believes.

Believes what? Verse 14 answers. The God who raised Jesus will raise us too. Some in the Corinthian church doubted the resurrection of the body, and Paul had spent an entire chapter of his earlier letter on the question (1 Corinthians 15). Here he brings that same conviction back as the ground of his whole life. A clay jar can break without that being the end, because there is One who raises what is broken. Then Paul adds two words that matter: with you. On resurrection day Paul does not expect to stand alone. He expects to stand alongside the very people he has served. For a church that had fallen out with him, that was no small thing to hear.

In verse 15 the lens widens. All this is for your benefit. His suffering, his speaking, his refusal to quit, all of it exists so that grace can keep reaching more people. As more people receive that grace, thanksgiving multiplies, and the thanksgiving rises to God as glory. Paul’s hardship does not end as one man’s private pain. It spreads out into many people’s gratitude.

Verse 16 opens with Therefore we do not lose heart. We have heard that sentence before, in verse 1 of this same chapter. Paul opens chapter 4 with it and closes it with it, and in between he places the clay jar and the list of pressures. So this is not the optimism of someone who has not suffered. It is the second confession of someone who has been through all of it.

Paul speaks of an outer self and an inner self. This is not a split between a bad body and a good soul. The outer self is our visible life, the part that wears down with time and trouble. The inner self is the person God is shaping from the inside. Both verbs are in the present tense. The outside keeps wasting away, and the inside keeps being renewed. Both are happening in the same person at the same time.

In verse 17 Paul calls his troubles light. Anyone who has read this whole letter knows how startling that is. In chapter 1 he said he was under great pressure, far beyond his ability to endure, so that he despaired of life itself. In chapter 11 he lists beatings, stoning, and shipwreck. When a man like that calls his troubles light, it is not because they were small. It is because what sits on the other side of the scale is so heavy. Paul describes glory as weight. In Hebrew, the word for glory and the word for heavy come from the same root. Paul plays on that, placing brief, light troubles and an eternal weight of glory on the same scale.

Verse 18 ends with a question of where we look. We fix our eyes on what is unseen. The verb means to aim your gaze as you would at a target. What is seen is temporary, what is unseen is eternal. And that leads straight into chapter 5, where the earthly tent may be torn down but there is an eternal house in heaven.

The shape of the whole letter is laid out in an introduction to 2 Corinthians. The jars of clay passage just before today’s reading is covered in Hard Pressed but Not Crushed (2 Corinthians 4:7-12), and the first we do not lose heart that opens chapter 4 appears in Not by Merit but by Mercy (2 Corinthians 4:1-6).

Key Words Made Simple

• Spirit of faith: Greek to auto pneuma tēs pisteōs, the same spirit of faith. The faith that carried the psalmist is the faith now carrying Paul. Many readers take it as the faith the Holy Spirit gives.
• Speak: Greek laleō, to open your mouth and say something. For Paul it means proclaiming the gospel. Faith does not stay locked inside; it comes out as words.
• Present: Greek paristēmi, to set someone beside or before another. It was used for presenting a bride to her groom or an offering at the altar.
• Reaching more and more people: Greek pleonazō, to increase, to multiply. Grace spreads from one person to many.
• Lose heart: Greek enkakeō, to run out of strength and give up. The same word appears in verse 1 and verse 16 of this chapter.
• Outwardly / inwardly: Greek exō anthrōpos and esō anthrōpos, the outer person and the inner person. The visible life and the life God is forming within.
• Wasting away: Greek diaphtheirō, to decay, to be worn down. The present tense suggests it is happening little by little, right now.
• Being renewed: Greek anakainoō, to be made new again. It is passive: not something we do to ourselves, but something God does in us.
• Light: Greek elaphros, not heavy, easy to carry. It is the same word Jesus used when he said my burden is light (Matthew 11:30).
• Glory: Greek doxa, which translates the Hebrew kavod. Kavod carries the sense of weight. Paul literally speaks of a weight of glory.
• Fix our eyes: Greek skopeō, to look intently at a goal. Our word scope, as in telescope, comes from the same family.
• Temporary: Greek proskairos, lasting only for a season. It is the exact counterpart of eternal.

Expressions Worth Noting

1. I believed; therefore I have spoken (verse 13)
   • Paul takes the words of a psalmist who survived deep distress and makes them his own. Faith is not decoration for good days; it is what opens your mouth on hard ones.
   • Belief comes first. Speech follows.
2. Present us with you to himself (verse 14)
   • Resurrection hope is not a solo rescue. It is the expectation of standing together.
   • In the middle of a strained relationship, Paul looks ahead to standing beside these very people.
3. Cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God (verse 15)
   • One person’s labor turns into many people’s gratitude. The verse shows where suffering can flow.
   • Every story here ends in glory returned to God.
4. Outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day (verse 16)
   • Paul does not deny that the outside is wearing out. He says so first.
   • Day by day matters. Renewal is not a single dramatic event but something that happens a little at a time.
5. Light and momentary troubles (verse 17)
   • This is not a call to treat pain as trivial. It is a claim that something far heavier sits on the other side.
   • Momentary and eternal, light and weighty, are set against each other like the two pans of a scale.
6. Not on what is seen, but on what is unseen (verse 18)
   • What we look at decides whether we lose heart.
   • Looking at the unseen is not ignoring reality. It is knowing where reality ends.

What the Passage Says

1. We speak because we believe (verse 13). Paul receives the faith of a psalmist who called on God from a place of anguish. He keeps proclaiming the gospel, not because things have improved, but because he believes.
2. The resurrection is the ground of endurance (verses 14-15). The God who raised Jesus will raise us and bring us to stand before him together with those we have served. Because of that hope, suffering is not wasted, and grace spreads to more people until it overflows as thanksgiving.
3. The outside wears down while the inside is renewed (verse 16). Paul does not hide that his body and life are being worn away. Yet in that same season, God is making him new within. That is why he does not lose heart.
4. Where we look changes what things weigh (verses 17-18). Set beside the weight of eternal glory, present troubles are brief and light. Fix your eyes on what is seen and you will collapse. Fix them on what is unseen and you will find strength to endure.

Standing Before This Word Today

Standing before this passage, the first place to linger is the opening half of verse 16. Outwardly we are wasting away.

Paul does not hesitate when he writes it. I am wearing out. That is simply true, he says. Most of us do not say this easily. That we do not have the energy we used to. That things we once handled easily now feel heavy. That body and heart are being worn down a little at a time. Admitting this is hard, so we push harder, try to accomplish more, and work to keep anyone from noticing that we are wearing thin.

Paul puts that fact on the table first. Then he sets another fact right beside it. Inwardly we are being renewed day by day. The two sentences do not cancel each other. The outside really is wasting away, and the inside really is being renewed. Paul does not ask us to pick one. He says both are happening in the same person at once.

That raises a question worth asking honestly. Which one am I counting? We are good at counting what is shrinking. What we have lost, what has weakened, what will not come back. There is nothing wrong with noticing those things. But if that is all we count, we end up losing heart. Paul did not lose heart because his outside was in good shape. He did not lose heart because he was also watching something else happen within.

It helps to notice that being renewed is passive. We do not renew ourselves. We are renewed. It is God’s work. So this renewal does not depend on how much strength I have left. On days with no energy, on days when it feels like nothing got done, the work may still be going on inside. Day by day includes those days too.

The second place to stay is verse 17. Light and momentary troubles.

To be honest, that phrase is hard to take. Telling someone under a heavy load that it is light can wound rather than comfort. But we have to remember who said it. This is the man who despaired of life itself. The man who was beaten, stoned, and spent a night and a day adrift at sea. He does not call his troubles light because he knows nothing about trouble.

Paul’s way of calling them light is a scale. On one side he puts present suffering, on the other the eternal weight of glory. The troubles are not light in themselves; the other side is incomparably heavy. So this word is not a demand to shrink our pain. It is an invitation not to forget the other side of the scale. Pain is heavy, and it is allowed to be heavy. It is just not the heaviest thing there is.

Momentary deserves attention too. When you are in the middle of hardship, it can feel like it will never end. Today runs into tomorrow, this week runs into next week, and it feels permanent. Paul does not deny that feeling, but he shows us a longer frame. Placed inside eternity, this is a moment. That does not mean it is short. It means it has an end.

The third place is verse 18. We fix our eyes on what is unseen.

The image is an archer sighting a target. Many things may be in view, but the eyes lock on one point. What is seen is always in front of us. The balance in the bank account, the face in the mirror, what other people think, the problems that did not get solved today. Those things show up without any effort. What is unseen has to be looked for on purpose.

So this verse teaches that faith is, in part, a discipline of attention. Not ignoring what is seen, but lifting our eyes while remembering that what is seen is not the last word. For Paul, the unseen was not something vague. It was the One who raised Jesus, the day we will stand together, the hand that renews us day by day. Because he kept looking there, he did not collapse when what he could see was shaking.

Finally, back to verse 13. I believed; therefore I have spoken.

This whole passage starts from that single line. With a body wearing down, carrying troubles that were anything but light, eyes fixed on what could not be seen, Paul kept speaking. He preached the gospel, he wrote letters, he reached out again to people who had hurt him. Those words did not come from easy circumstances. They came from faith.

So the question this word leaves with us is this. What am I counting right now, and where are my eyes? We cannot stop the outside from wearing away. But we can learn to see the renewal happening within. What is seen is temporary; what is unseen is eternal. Whoever holds on to that can remain a jar of clay and still not lose heart.

Living It Out

1. Be honest about what is wearing down. Think of one thing that is not what it used to be, whether stamina, passion, or patience. Before you hide it or force it back up, say it plainly before God. Paul started with outwardly we are wasting away.
2. Look for one thing that was renewed today. At the end of the day, instead of counting only what went down, write down one thing that was made new inside you. A small insight, a word spoken a little more gently, a willingness to try again. Day by day is built out of small things like that.
3. Put your burden on the scale. Think of the problem that feels heaviest right now, and on the other side place what God has promised. The point is not to minimize the trouble. It is to remember that the other side of the scale is not empty.
4. Set aside time to look at the unseen. Even for a few minutes a day, choose a place to take your eyes off visible problems and look, through Scripture and prayer, at what is unseen. Our gaze does not lift itself. It has to be lifted on purpose.
5. Speak one word because you believe. Do not wait for everything to be resolved. Today, offer someone one word that comes from faith, whether comfort or thanks. As we saw in Hard Pressed but Not Crushed (2 Corinthians 4:7-12), light can still pass through the cracks in a jar of clay.

Questions to Sit With

1. In my life lately, which do I count more often: what is shrinking or what is being renewed?
2. How does it land for me that God may be at work inside me even on days when I have no energy and feel I accomplished nothing?
3. If I place my current troubles on the scale of eternity, what looks different?
4. What visible thing most often captures my gaze? What should I lift my eyes toward instead?
5. Have I ever spoken, not because things were going well, but because I believed? What word of faith do I need to speak today?

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