2 Cor. 11:7-11 – The Cost Of Preaching The Gospel For Free

Translation & Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ The Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS, 07 June 2026
Underlined words in Scripture quotes indicate words that are in common with the Greek text of the sermon passage. Otherwise, underlining indicates words to emphasize when reading this transcript out loud.

Introduction

• It is our hope and dream at Christ The Redeemer Church to plant more churches where they are needed both locally and around the world. This is essential to fulfilling our vision of “evangelizing the world.” But have you ever stopped to think of what it would cost to plant another church?

• In 2 Corinthians 11, the Apostle Paul gives us a reality-check about this grand and spiritual goal. The establishment and health of the church in Corinth came at great cost to himself.

• Read my translation of the passage, starting at verse 4:
  ...when the [new]comer preaches about another Jesus (about whom we did not preach), or [when] y’all accept a different spirit which y’all had not accepted [before] – or a different gospel which y’all had not received [before], y’all have been putting up [with it] nicely, however, I reckon I’ve lacked nothing compared to the most-eminent apostles. But even if I am un-credentialed in word, I am not, however, in knowledge, but rather in every way we have been revealing ourselves in all things to y’all. Or did I commit a sin when I humbled myself in order that you yourselves might be exalted, because I preached God’s good news to y’all for free? It was other churches that I looted, having taken pay for the sake of ministry for y’all. And when I was alongside y’all and was in need, I did not exhaust anyone, for the brothers who came from Macedonia filled up to the brim what I needed, and in everything I kept (and will keep) myself unburdensome with y’all. Because this brag is the truth of the Anointed One in me, it will not be sealed up in me in the climes of Achaia. For what reason? Because I do not love y’all?? God knows. But what I am doing I will continue doing, in order that I might cut off the opportunity from those who want an opportunity, in order that, in what they brag about themselves, they may be found just as we are also.

• As we consider the costs which the Apostle Paul bore, please consider whether you would be willing to bear some of these costs in order to multiply God’s church in your lifetime. The first cost Paul mentions in...

v.7 Humility

• As the Apostle Paul grapples in 2 Corinthians chapter 11 with why it was that so many Christians in Corinth had abandoned the gospel which he had preached to them and had started following false teachers instead, he says in verse 5 that it can’t be because he was inferior to the false apostles. He had every bit as much knowledge and experience as they did, plus he had been directly commissioned by the glorified Jesus Christ.

  • As he gropes for a reason to understand what happened, he suggests in verse 6 that maybe it was because he didn’t have quite the level of rhetorical flourish that the new teachers did,

  • and here in verse 7, he suggests that perhaps his own humility was a stumbling block.

  • Humility is only popular to a point; the world prefers proud, self-confident people. Since Paul was not proud and self-confident in the way he presented himself in Corinth, he sarcastically asks if he sinned against them!¹

• God says that He hates pride and (Prov. 8:13) and confidence in man (Psalm 118:8), but that He blesses those who humble themselves before Him (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5).

  • And God gave us the example of Christ Jesus humbling Himself: Philippians 2:5-8 “Have this attitude in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, while existing in God's form, did not consider being equal to God a prize to be clutched, but rather, emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant – being born in the likeness of men. And while He was found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death – even death by crucifixion.” (NAW)

  • Paul then followed Christ’s example and humbled himself. Philippians 4:12-13 “I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him [Christ] who strengthens me.” (ESV)

• But Paul’s choice to teach his new doctrine about Jesus Christ free-of-charge (instead of starting a school and charging tuition to his disciples like the Greek and Roman teachers normally did) may have been somewhat counter-cultural.

  • We generally find it true that “you get what you pay for,” and since Paul didn’t charge a premium price for his teaching, there were those who thought his teaching must not be worth anything.²

  • The truth was that his teaching was priceless and worth more than anyone could imagine. Who can put a price on spending eternity in paradise instead of hell? That costs more than any human can afford; that’s why Jesus had to pay the price of eternal death for us.

  • Paul had decided upon a strategy of teaching for free in the synagogue and in private homes in Corinth (Acts 18), in order to picture God’s free offer of salvation through Jesus and in order to make Christian discipleship truly available to anyone who wanted it, without cost being a barrier. This strategy, however, risked being considered low-class socially by those who cared more about educational prestige.

• How about you?

  • Are you willing to buck the world’s standards of prestige in order to follow Jesus and reach the lost?

  • Are you willing to be considered foolish or low-class for being an ambassador of Christ?

  • Have you begun to understand how inestimably valuable the Gospel is that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”? (1 Tim. 1:15, KJV)

  • Are you willing to “...let yourselves start being humbled under the mighty hand of God…”? (1 Peter 5:6, NAW)

• Part and parcel of Paul’s humble status then in Corinth was to raise financial support from outside of Corinth so that he could offer his teaching for free. This second cost is mentioned in v.7 and highlighted in...

v.8 Outside Fundraising

• Let me point out a couple of things about the Greek grammar of verse 8:

  • “Ministry” is a noun (not a verb) in all the original manuscripts.

  • The Greek words for “robbed” and “wages/support” are military words.

  • And “other churches” is in the emphatic position at the beginning of v.8 in Greek.

• So Paul emphasizes that it was other churches (not the Corinthians) from which he “stripped-off loot” to pay for his church-planting ministry in Corinth.

  • In Bible times³, hired soldiers were paid in advance for their services (often in the form of salt or preserved food), and then they performed their duty of service. Now Paul wasn’t actually a thief or a military officer, but he often conceived of his ministry according to a military paradigm⁴.

  • He had been commissioned by Jesus to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles at the uttermost parts of the earth, so Paul had raised money from other churches – from his sending church in Antioch, Syria, and from the churches he had planted in Asia Minor and Macedonia, and he used that money to travel to Corinth to preach the gospel there.

  • 18^th century Puritan commentator Matthew Henry noted that, “He had proved at large, in his former epistle to them, the lawfulness of ministers' receiving maintenance from the people, and the duty of the people to give them an honourable maintenance; and here he says he himself had taken wages of other churches, so that he had a right to have asked and received from them: yet he waived his right, and chose rather to abase himself, by working with his hands in the trade of tent-making to maintain himself… that they might be exalted, or encouraged to receive the gospel...”

  • If you’ve never had to raise funds before, let me tell you, it’s hard work. I lived that life for over 15 years.

    • It’s really awkward to go around asking for money. It gets to the point that whenever you contact a friend to visit them, they don’t see it as an act of friendship; they just think you’re going to ask them for money. And then there’s all the hoops you have jump through to apply for funding from churches, knowing that most of it is going to be a waste of time because most of them won’t even show the courtesy of responding to your request, but you have to do it anyway because it’s the only way to find the ones that are willing to give financial support.

    • It’s also hard to listen to everybody’s excuses as to why they won’t support your ministry. I remember calling an uncle to ask for financial support and him declining to make a donation, saying, “You should get gainfully-employed instead!” After conversations like that, I just felt like giving up!

    • And even when people would pledge to donate to the ministry, then I’d have to bend over backwards to keep them happy with impressive reports and regular visits, never knowing when they might decide to stop supporting me because some other, more-exciting missionary convinced them to support them instead of me. (And yes, that did happen.)

    • And then there’s the financial uncertainty of not having a predictable salary – never knowing how much income there would be next month (or next year) due to the con­stantly-changing circumstances of donors, and never knowing how much longer I would be able to do my ministry because, every once in a while, a bunch of donors would drop out, and I would have to go back into full-time fund-raising instead of actually doing the ministry. Living off missionary support took a real toll on me and my family.

• But Paul raised the money to get to Corinth, and then, once he got to Corinth, he needed more money, so he became an employee at a tent-making shop to cover his living expenses (Acts 18:3).

  • The only thing I can think of that would be more difficult than living on missionary support is bi-vocational ministry: you work a full-time job, come home exhausted, and then work another whole shift ministering to needy people before you can go to bed. But Paul didn’t complain about it. He just said things like:

    • 1 Corinthians 4:12 “...we labor hard, working with our own hands...” (NAW)

    • Acts 20:34 "...you yourselves know that these hands have provided for my necessities, and for those who were with me.” (NKJV)

    • 1 Thessalonians 2:9 “For you remember, brethren, our labor and toil; for laboring night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, we preached to you the gospel of God.” (NKJV)

    • 1 Corinthians 9:18 “What therefore is my reward? That when I evangelize I might set forth the gospel without cost in order not to make absolute use of my authority in the gospel.” (NAW)

• Preaching the gospel and planting a new church in Corinth took a lot of fund-raising effort on Paul’s part. It also took a lot of fund-raising effort for me to begin pastoring Christ The Redeemer Church, and it took a lot of volunteer hours from our founding members on top of their regular jobs to get this ministry off the ground. The only alternative was to charge admis­sion like musicians at a concert or teachers at a school, and we didn’t want to do that because we wanted the Gospel and the ministry of the church to be offered freely to this community.

  • Paul’s approach to financing his church-planting seems to have been a pay-it-forward strategy, where he would serve in a church, then ask them to send him to go plant an­other church. He would use those funds to travel to a new city and get started preaching the gospel and organizing a church, then he would ask that church to send him on to another city to do it again. Sometimes he lived on donations, and sometimes he worked another job, depending on the circumstances.⁵

  • Would you be willing to pay the cost of a lot of volunteer hours beyond your income-earning job or even of going through the hard work of raising missionary support in order to plant another church? I believe God will call some of you to do that. Are you willing to pay that price to “set forth the Gospel without cost”?

    • Are you as a church willing to pay forward on the ministry you have received freely at our church to send out more church planters with your financial support? Will you support ministers of the Gospel like the Macedonians did?

    • Philippi, one of the Macedonian churches was exemplary in this. Paul wrote them in Philippians 4:16, “...in my necessities ye sent unto me once and again, even in the beginning of the Gospel.” (KJV)

• Verse 9 introduces yet another cost paid by Paul to keep the gospel free in Corinth, and that is what I will call...

v.9 Displaced Community

• You get the picture from what Paul says in verse 9 that if he had any needs, he wouldn’t have made them known to the Corinthians. Instead, he looked for his needs to be met by the Christians⁶ in Macedonia, 100 miles away. Paul apparently didn’t feel that he could really let his hair down around the people to whom he was ministering in Corinth. There were things he couldn’t share with them.

• That is a typical hardship for anyone in leadership.

  • If a ministry leader is too transparent about their problems and needs, it can destroy the very work they came to do, so they have to rely on outside relationships for an important part of their community.

  • It’s not that they are fake in relationships, just that they have to be wise to know how much is too much to share.

  • Parents experience this same phenomenon with raising children. When the groceries need to be carried into the house from the car, I don’t give the 50 pound bag of flour to the 5-year-old to carry in (That would be way too heavy for her!); I put it on MY shoulder and I hand her maybe a gallon of milk to carry instead.

  • This has also been part of my experience in ministry. As a faith-supported missionary, there were things that I struggled with that my friends at church just didn’t seem to understand like other missionaries understood. And as a pastor, there have been multiple parishioners that my wife and I were too honest with about our struggles, and, as a result, our relationship with those parishioners was damaged and never recovered, because they could not handle the weight of what we tried to share. I’ve learned that, when I need to decompress about a church problem, rather than sharing it with a parishioner, I need to share it with other pastors who understand from experience and who are capable of handling such burdens. But this comes at the cost of sometimes feeling like an outsider to both your supporting community and your target community.

• Later on in 2 Corinthians 12:14 & 16 Paul wrote, “...I am ready to come to you. And I will not be burdensome to you; for I do not seek yours, but you. For the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children… But be that as it may, I did not burden you...” (NKJV)

• Is that a price you would be willing to pay? – uprooting from a comfortable community in order to plant the Gospel elsewhere and live the rest of your life in-between your sending community and your ministry community?

• Another cost is the additional time and thought required of a missionary to communicate with donors and with others, especially about finances.

v.10 Public Relations

• If I had gone into the electrical engineering job I went to college for, I wouldn’t have to ex­plain my income and expenditures to anybody but the IRS, but when I became a missionary and started living on faith support, my financial affairs could not longer be a private matter.

  • I was required to submit my budget to my home church, and when they saw in my budget that I was having to pay off student loans because I went to a Christian college to prepare for ministry instead of going to a secular college (which wouldn’t have given me any Bible training but also wouldn’t have cost so much), they refused to support me at first.

  • I had to spend vast numbers of hours tracking donations, providing tax-deductible receipts, writing newsletters, and giving reports to my supporters.

  • I’m not saying that missionaries shouldn’t have financial accountability; I’m just saying that this is yet another cost that should be considered in providing Gospel ministry for free.

• In verse 10, there are two nominative nouns: “boasting” and “truth,”

  • and they are equivocated by a verb of being. In other words, “this boasting” IS “the truth of Christ in me,” and

  • both of these nominative phrases are the subject of the verb “it will not be stopped/silenced.”

• I know that there are a few Greek manuscripts which spell the verb actively (as in, “no one will stop me”), but the overwhelming majority of Greek manuscripts from the oldest to the most recent (as well as the ancient Latin, Syriac, and Coptic versions) spell this verb in its passive form, meaning, “it will not be stopped/silenced,” and I think that’s the way to go.

• The Greek verb has a root meaning of “being sealed,” so it could be interpreted in terms of “shutting up/sealing off” or “completing” a project.

• What was this “true” “boast” made under the influence of “Christ in” Paul which would “not be sealed/stopped”? I think it is the “boast” or asseveration Paul made in verse 9 that he had never been (and never would be) a financial “burden” to the Corinthians.⁷

• The last phrase of v.10 is literally “into me in the regions of Achaia.” Achaia, of course, being the province around the city of Corinth.⁸

• The little phrase “into me” is interpreted three ways in the English translations:

  • The NIV, NAS, and ESV interpreted it possessively as “my boasting.” It was indeed Paul’s boast and no other’s, but it is not spelled here in the Greek possessive/genitive form but rather in the form of an accusative/object, so “my boasting” is not technically accurate.

  • The KJV, Revised, and New Living versions make “me” the object of “stop.” This is a proper use of the accusative/objective spelling of “me” in Greek, but in order to do this, they changed the preposition “into,” which comes before “me” in Greek, into a different preposition with a different meaning, and moved another word (with a mismatched case ending) to be its prepositional object, so I don’t think that is technically precise either.

  • I actually prefer the English translations of the Vulgate and the Peshitta at this point:

    • The Rheims New Testament reads “...this glorying shall not be broken off in me in the regions of Achaia,”

    • and Murdock’s English version of the Syriac is “this glorying shall not be made vain as to me in the regions of Achaia.”

  • In other words, Paul’s intention not to be a financial burden to the church in Corinth is not going to be hidden from them. He has now revealed plainly that he does not plan to ask them for any financial support when he returns, and they can count on him actually fulfilling his promise.

    • This fits with what he said back in verse 6: “in every way we have been revealing ourselves in all things to y’all” (NAW) “We have thoroughly manifested/made this perfectly clear to you in every way.” Paul is communicating his financial policies so they can rest assured that he will not ask them for money when he visits.

• Because Paul had committed to apostolic church planting, he had to invest time in communi­cations that he would not have had to do if he had stayed in the desert of Arabia and herded sheep instead (Gal. 1:17).

• Would you be willing to open yourself up to the kind of scrutiny that missionaries have to face financially and spend the time that has to be spent keeping financial records that can be shared with donors and communicating with them about money so that the Gospel could reach more people?

• The next cost that Paul had to pay involved ironing out misunderstandings⁹ and clearing his reputation from slander, which is what most of 2 Corinthians is about. 20^th Century commenta­tor Phillip Hughes wrote, “It is not difficult to infer that Paul's rivals in Achaia criticized this [financial] practice of his because, in fact, it put them at a disadvantage. Their [so-called] ‘gospel’ provided them with an income, a livelihood; and that, compared with Paul's obvious and utter disinterestedness, cast the shadow of suspicion on their motives. And so they fabricated the further despicable calumny that Paul's independence, his refusal to accept the gifts offered by the Corinthians, was an indication that he was lacking in love for them.”

v.11 Misunderstanding

• “Those that we love, we treat with greater familiarity. Lest the Corinthians, therefore, should take it amiss, that he refused their liberality, while he allowed himself to be assisted by the Macedonians…, he calls God to be a witness of his good disposition towards them.” ~J. Calvin, 1546 AD

• He already told them in as many words in 2 Corinthians 6:11 “Our mouth has opened toward y'all, Corinthians; our heart has been made expansive.” (NAW) And in chapter 12 v.15 he will affirm that, “...I will very gladly spend and be spent for your souls... the more abundantly I love you...” (NKJV)

• But when it comes to motives, we can’t really know what another person is thinking and why they are doing what they are doing. We may think we know the reason, but it’s just a guess. God alone knows their heart, so Paul appeals to God’s perfect knowledge to deny that it was any lack of love on his part to refuse support from the Corinthian church. He was doing it because he loved them and he wanted to make the Gospel easier for them to accept so that more of them would be saved and have eternal life.

• Misunderstandings come with the territory of leadership, especially when relationships are long-distance, and especially when there is opposition. Paul had been trying to pastor the church in Corinth from across the sea while false teachers had been trying to take over the church; no wonder the rumors and gossip were flying!

• Paul was also accused of being a liar. He had to address that slander in three different letters:

  • At the end of this chapter he writes: “God... knows that I am not lying.” (2 Co. 11:31, NKJV)

  • Then about a year later, in Romans 9:1, “I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying...” (NKJV)

  • Then a few years later, in 1 Timothy 2:7, “...I am speaking the truth in Christ and not lying...” (NKJV)

• When I was in mission work in Colorado, my manager, unbeknownst to me, told my home church in Alabama that I was lazy, rebellious, and dishonest. He had not actually found me to be lazy, rebellious, and dishonest – at least he never mentioned it to me (He always told me what a good job I was doing.), but it destroyed my relationship with the mission committee at my home church. Years later, he apologized to me for slandering me in a moment of spite, but by then the damage was irreversible.

• St. Patrick, the great 5^th century missionary from England to Ireland also had to deal with misunderstandings and slander, both with the pagan Irish princes he was evangelizing as well as with his British supporters back home. The main reason that we even have a biography of Patrick’s life today is because a jealous bishop spread rumors about him at his home church back in England, so the church put Patrick on trial for financial fraud, and Patrick had to write an autobiography as part of his defense against those false charges.

• Satan plays dirty, and ministers are his prime targets. Are you willing to step into spiritual leadership as a missionary or church planter and brave the opposition and communicate through the misunderstandings?

• Are you willing to think the best of church leaders and work to bring understanding that will smooth the way for their ministry rather than cause problems for them?

• It is a comfort to know that we can appeal to God who knows the truth and understands our motives even when others misinterpret and malign us.

• One last cost to sharing the Gospel for free that I want to mention from this passage is in...

v.12 Perseverance in the Work of the Ministry

• Paul says he’s going to just keep right on doing what he’s been doing in ministry. He’s not going to slack off; he’s not going to give up in frustration.

  • If you engage in church planting, it will involve long hours of hard work, and you will be tempted at some point to give up.

  • I remember having to persevere for agonizing years with a congregation of only sixteen people besides my family, wondering week after week if it was worth me pouring 70 hours a week into this tiny church. Sometimes I thought it was an exercise in futility. I often have to just keep putting one foot in front of the other in order to keep doing the last thing God called me to do, trusting that God knows what He’s doing and He will give me the ability to keep going.

• Now, the main thing Paul is saying he will continue to do is not to take financial support from the church in Corinth, and he gives two reasons in v.12 for why he’s going to keep on keeping on in this, both introduced with a hina purpose clause indicator in Greek.

  • First, he acknowledges that if he gives up on Corinth, he would be ceding ground to the false teachers; he would be giving them the opportunity/occasion to make the claim that, “See, we are the real spiritual authorities in this town. Paul wasn’t a real apostle; Jesus wasn’t really the Messiah. You’ve got to do what we tell you from here on out!” Paul doesn’t want that happening, so he is going to continue laboring to offer the Gospel free of charge in hopes that it will cut the ground out from under the false apostles who are greedily taking money from the church and thus cut off their opportunities to lead the church astray.

  • The second reason Paul will keep ministering for free to the Corinthians is introduced by the word “that” or “to,” “in order that, in what they boast/glory of themselves, they may be regarded/considered/literally found just as we are also/equal/working on the same terms.”

    • Some English versions don’t see this second instance of the Greek word ‘hina as a sec­ond purpose. They reinterpret it as an indirect discourse indicator and connect it with the desire of the false apostles to be considered just as real apostles as Paul and Timothy were.

    • However, I think that the Greek grammar of this verse should be interpreted straight­forwardly as a second purpose, that, by offering the Gospel for free and being an authentic ambassador of Christ, Paul will prove to be everything that the false apostles boast themselves of being. The contrast is between what they boast of being and what Paul and Timothy actually are, and the hope is that by continuing to faithfully represent the free offer of the Gospel, even some of the false apostles might become true representatives of Christ just like Paul and Timothy are.

• Back in 1 Corinthians 9:12 Paul had already explained to the Corinthians about his author­ity to raise funds from their church, “...we did not use this authority, rather we are covering over these things in order that we might give no kind of disconnect in regards to the gospel of the Christ.” (NAW)

• Are you willing to keep on keeping on and work hard in the leadership or support of the church “in order that we might give no kind of disconnect in regards to the gospel of the Christ”?

Conclusion

• The apostle Paul put up with:

  • Forgoing the respectable income of a Greek philosopher-teacher,

  • Having to live in want due to unpredictable financial support,

  • Not having a true local community anywhere, because of being an outsider to the target community and having to maintain long-distance ties to his supporting community,

  • Having to write lots of letters to supporters,

  • Living in a fishbowl, as it were, where lots of people scrutinized his life to find fault with him – he was misunderstood and accused falsely,

  • and he worked hard in ministry for long seasons.

• But because he (and others) paid the price, Christianity came to our ancestors in Asia, Africa, and Europe and eventually to us.

• If we are serious about planting more churches and finishing world evangelization, we must count the cost and pay the price out of love to our Lord Jesus Who gave His all for us!

2 Corinthians 11:6-12 – Comparison of Textual Traditions & Versions^A