121 Days of Prayer

I Am Afraid that Your Minds Will Be Corrupted

The purposes of this prayer are: Spreading of the Gospel, Guidance/Purpose and Leadership.

Eternal Father, when Paul learned that other evangelists were preaching about a Christ different from the Christ that he taught them, he sent the Corinthians a second epistle to address his concerns about their proper understanding of who Jesus is and what he had accomplished in their behalf, writing, “I am afraid that your minds will be corrupted and that you will abandon your full and pure devotion to Christ- in the same way that Eve was deceived by the snake’s clever lies. For you gladly tolerate anyone who comes to you and preaches a different Jesus, not the one we preached; and you accept a spirit and a gospel completely different from the Spirit and the gospel you received from us! I do not think that I am the least bit inferior to those very special so-called ‘apostles’ of yours! Perhaps I am an amateur in speaking, but certainly not in knowledge; we have made this clear to you at all times and in all conditions. I did not charge you a thing when I preached the Good News of God to you; I humbled myself in order to make you important. Was that wrong of me? While I was working among you, I was paid by other churches. I was robbing them, so to speak, in order to help you. And during the time I was with you I did not bother you for help when I needed money; the brothers who came from Macedonia brought me everything I needed. As in the past, so in the future: I will never be a burden to you! By Christ’s truth in me, I promise that this boast of mine will not be silenced anywhere in all of Achaia. Do I say this because I don’t love you? God knows I love you! I will go on doing what I am doing now, in order to keep those other ‘apostles’ from having any reason for boasting and saying that they work in the same way that we do. Those men are not true apostles- they are false apostles, who lie about their work and disguise themselves to look like real apostles of Christ.” 2 Corinthians 11:3–13 (TEV). Heavenly Father, we pray for the ability to discern true teachings of the Bible from false teachings. For it is only through our correct understanding of what Jesus did in our behalf that leads to our repentance, forgiveness and eternal salvation. Amen.