As many of you no doubt remember, I preached through 1 Corinthians from 2007 to 2009. 1 Cor has 16 chapters, and it took us roughly three years to make our way through it.

Today, we’ll start a journey through 2 Cor. I don’t know if it will take three years, but I wouldn’t doubt that it might take almost that long.

2 Cor is kind of a neglected book. There are individual passages in the book that are very well known, but it tends not to be on lists of the most popular books, and many preachers never get around to preaching through it.

I find 2 Cor a more difficult book to read and understand than is 1 Cor. Some of the language is rather unusual and parts of it are not easy to comprehend on first reading. Maybe the difficulty of the language is one of the reasons 2 Cor is often neglected.

Of course, the book is inspired Scripture. Whether it’s popular or not, it is profitable for us to read and study the book.

As I often do when beginning a new series, I’d like to take the first message to look at some of the background of the book. Before getting into the text itself, we should try to get an overview of the whole thing so we can understand the parts of it and how it all fits together. We need to consider the forest before looking at the individual trees.