Fixing the Porch : Do Not Lose Heart
Is it foolish to keep fixing the porch when the whole house is sinking?
I have asked myself that about more than a porch. Several years ago I invested in a laptop. Today that laptop continues to grow obsolete as technology advances rapidly. It's the same in my job. We invest in equipment that has end of life in 5 years or less. Things we invest in today have rapid obsolescence. Interestingly enough, everything we are surrounded in has that too. We replace the transmission on a truck with 190,000 miles, tune up the retirement account while the market lurches, and repaint a church building that needs a new roof. Some of that is good stewardship, and I will not pretend otherwise. But there comes a day when we hold the old laptop in our hands, weighing whether to replace it, and wonder what exactly we are holding together.
Paul wrote to the church at Corinth from inside a hard life, and he did not dress it up.
"So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day." (2 Corinthians 4:16, ESV)
He calls the decay of the body what it is. Wasting away is his phrase, and he leaves it standing. Then he sets something beside it that is not wasting away and shows us where he looks. Two verses on, he reaches past the body to everything we can see:
"as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal." (2 Corinthians 4:18, ESV)
Nothing here forbids honest work or the care of a household. Elsewhere the New Testament commands both:
"Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need." (Ephesians 4:28, ESV)
"But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." (1 Timothy 5:8, ESV)
What Paul addresses in this passage is where the eyes rest.
Part of why he can say we do not lose heart sits two verses back.
"knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence." (2 Corinthians 4:14, ESV)
That "So" at the front of verse 16 reaches back across the verses before it, and verse 14 puts the resurrection under it. Take the resurrection out and "do not lose heart" is only a cheerful thing to say. Verse 17 gives a second reason, a "light momentary affliction" weighed against "an eternal weight of glory" (2 Corinthians 4:17, ESV). I am taking verse 14 here.
A picture of my own, not Paul's. A man spends thirty years building a business. It takes his evenings, his weekends, some of his health. Then the market turns, or his hands stop doing what they used to do. He was no fool to build it. If his heart lived there, he grieves like a man with no place to stand. Most of us are some of both men. The one whose heart was anchored somewhere else grieves the same loss and still finds something solid under his boots.
The verse comforts, and it presses on us too. What we are losing is not the last thing, and the wasting away is no reason to lose heart. And we have poured our best hours into what we already knew was going under and called it responsibility. Sometimes it was fear.
What belongs on the list of things unseen? Paul does not write it out here. The nearest he comes is verse 14: the Lord Jesus raised, and a people raised with Him and brought into His presence together. I would put that first. I suspect the list runs longer, but this passage does not hand me the rest, and I would want another text in front of me before I wrote it down.
What follows is my counsel, not Paul's command. Where have the hours and the money gone? What in all of it reaches past the wasting away? We can move something toward that, even something small: call the brother who has drifted, open the Bible before we pick up the phone, give somewhere nobody will thank us for.
One more text bears on the question I opened with. In his first letter to this same church, Paul ends his long argument about the resurrection like this:
"Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain." (1 Corinthians 15:58, ESV)
That "Therefore" rests on the resurrection he has just argued. I will not stretch the work of the Lord over every repair we make. I read it this way: labor done in the Lord is not wasted, even when what we are laboring over is passing away.
The house may well be sinking. We may keep fixing the porch. In this passage Paul does not ask us to hold the house up. He shows us where he looks: at what is not wasting away.
The One who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us with Him.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2025. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
